One Square Inch of Silence
noise control project
One Square Inch of Silence is a noise control project symbolized by a small red stone symbolically placed in Hoh Rainforest at Olympic National Park in 2005 by author and sound recording specialist Gordon Hempton. The stone's location has been called "the quietest place in the United States". According to commercial pilot Philip Greenspun, some airlines have voluntarily rerouted flights to avoid inducing noise pollution at the square inch. Hempton has formed a foundation to prevent jet aircraft noise in Olympic National Park and other parks.
Hempton's works, including One Square Inch of Silence, were covered in the 2010 documentary Soundtracker which debuted at the Sedona Film Festival.
References
Further reading
Hempton, Gordon; Grossmann, John (2009). One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World. Free Press (Simon & Schuster). ISBN 978-1416559085.
Man's quest to defend one square-inch of silence, KING-TV, May 16, 2011, archived from the original on December 17, 2014, retrieved December 15, 2014
Tippett, Krista (2012).
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18712476. Authority coordinates are 47.866, -123.870. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2010, 2009 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “One Square Inch of Silence” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.