Deep Sounds

In Music at Night and Other Essays, novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley wrote,

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."

Anticipating near silence, marine acoustic oceanographers found music to their ears in the deepest point on Earth.

You would think that the deepest part of the ocean would be one of the quietest places on Earth. Yet there is almost constant noise.
— Robert Dziak, marine acoustics oceanographer

In an ocean trench deep enough to hide Mount Everest, scientists listened to natural and human-made sounds including baleen whale vocalizations and ship propellers.

Baleen whale by Nobu Tamura

The ambient sound field is dominated by the sound of earthquakes, both near and far, as well as distinct moans of baleen whales, and the clamor of a category 4 typhoon that just happened to pass overhead.
— Robert Dziak

Hydrophone lowered into
Challenger Deep

A hydrophone was lowered into the Challenger Deep trough — a depth of more than 7 miles. The ceramic hydrophone was encased in a titanium housing to withstand the great pressure at those depths.

The purpose of this 3-week data collection expedition was to establish a baseline acoustic level at depth. Some marine animals rely on sound to feed, navigate, and communicate.

Marine scientists hope to continue monitoring how growing levels of human-made sounds affect acoustically-sensitive marine life.

Silence will contain all the sounds,
All the words, all the languages,
All knowledge, all memory.
— Dejan Stojanovic

REFERENCES

• Music at Night and Other Essays, Aldous Huxley, 1931.
• Seven Miles Deep, the Ocean is Still a Noisy Place, NOAA, 2 March 2016.

Between Every Two Pine Trees

John Muir left marginal notes in a copy of The prose works of Ralph Waldo Emerson located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

John Muir's marginal notes in The prose works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marginal note 492 reads:

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.
― John Muir

Soda Butte Creek

Muir expressed wonder at the rewards of the reverence of natural phenomena. Muir's optimism was to experience each trek into a pine forest or each introspective journey as a door to a life renewed.

“But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”
― Aldous Huxley

Nature is indifferent to space and time. Our home planet, an improbable satellite, rotates away from the Sun to create the illusion of time.

View west from Peet's Hill

REFERENCES

• The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.
• The prose works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1869.