MARINA KOREN: Four Ways the Coronavirus Is Changing the Planet
From inside her living
room in London, Paula Koelemeijer can feel the world around her growing
quieter. Koelemeijer, a
seismologist, has a miniature seismometer sitting on a concrete slab at the
base of her first-floor fireplace. The apparatus, though smaller than a box of
tissues, can sense all kinds of movement, from the rattle of trains on the
tracks near Koelemeijer’s home to the waves of earthquakes rolling in from
afar. Since the United Kingdom announced stricter
social-distancing rules last month, telling residents not to leave their home
except for essential reasons, the seismometer has registered a sharp decrease
in the vibrations produced by human activity.
With fewer trains,
buses, and people pounding the pavement, the usual hum of public life has
vanished, and so has its dependable rhythms: Before the spread of COVID-19 shut
down the city, Koelemeijer could plot the seismometer’s data and see the train
schedule reflected in the spikes, down to the minute. Now, with fewer trains
running, the spikes seem to come at random. “It’s very literally
reflecting a slowdown of our lives,” Koelemeijer told me over Skype.
Koelemeijer said she
briefly geeked out over the recent data before reality set in. At first glance,
this is indeed a fascinating observation, the kind of factoid that might appear
on the underside of a
Snapple cap. The “wow” moment is short-lived, of course, because the
explanation is not a quirk of nature or some other benign eccentricity,
but a
catastrophic virus that has sickened and killed thousands, crumpled
economies, and plunged public life into a fearful limbo with no
easily discernible end....
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-earth-pollution-noise/609316/