Acoustic Models to Consider Noise Pollution from a Possible Port on Humpback Whales in the Gulf of Tribugá, Colombia

The Gulf of Tribugá is a relatively pristine acoustic environment in the Colombian north Pacific. Since the 1990s, many administrations have tried to build a deepwater port in Tribugá. While the construction permits were most recently denied in September 2020, they could be applied for again in the future. If built, the Gulf’s terrestrial and marine environments would change forever. One strategy to promote the conservation of these marine and coastal habitats is to visually illustrate how much ocean space that ship noise could occupy if a seaport were built. Thus, noise footprints of possible configurations of shipping lanes were simulated. Acoustic propagation models were made for a “control” shipping lane configuration and two predictive lane configurations to compare the spatial coverage of their noise footprints that had levels above the threshold of humpback whale audibility. Differences in the spatial extent of these configurations were found, with the deepwater trench and the random configurations more similar to each other than the control configuration, and both non-control ones had noise occupying more space than the control configuration.