The Athabasca River From The Columbia Ice Field Essay

The statement ‘Canada oil sands are much more of a blessing rather than a curse’ is not true because the disadvantages of oil sands outweigh the advantages. For this reason, this paper aims at indicating points against the statement. To understand the defects of oil sand exploration in Canada, one has to delve into the explanation of what oil sands are as well as how the entire process of mining and refining and thereafter, determine the disadvantages based on socioeconomic factors, environmental factors, as well as the infrastructure and energy required for its production.

The aim of this essay is to investigate the overall health of the Credit River located in Southern Ontario, Canada through data collected for phosphates, nitrates, dissolved oxygen and pH levels over many years. The Credit River originates around the city of Orangeville and then travels downstream for about 65 kilometers into Lake Ontario, near the Greater Toronto Area (Orphanos, 2004). It is essential to discover the health of this major river as it is one of the few which makes it way through the large urbanized zone including the city of Mississauga. There is a diverse wildlife that is supported by the water source, and it must be considered a priority to sustainably manage and investigate the concentrations of contaminants and water quality

Alberta is a province that is rich and abundant in natural resources such as oil sands. What are oil sands? Oil reserves play a very important role in the Canadian economy. Oil sands from areas such as Alberta have been described as “Canadians greatest buried energy treasure” by popular magazines such as Time magazine. Oil sands are a naturally existing mixture of sand, clay and other materials such as water and bitumen. Some materials in oil sands including bitumen are highly viscous that they need to be treated and refined before they can be used by industrial sites in order to produce fuels such as gasoline. Oil sands can be refined to make oil. There are approximately 170.4 billion barrels of oil that can be used in the Northern part of Alberta. Approximately 80% of the oil sands can be recovered through the In-situ production. 20% of the 80% is oil that can be recovered and purified by mining. Bitumen, a highly viscous material in oil sands is found by mining 90% of the time. While oil sands have a positive effect on us, it has a very negative effect on the environment. Oil sands have a very negative effect on aquatic ecosystems all around the world. Oil sands use up a lot of the water and energy. At present, two to five barrels of natural and recycled water are needed for every barrel of oil produced for mining. Oil sand project affect the natural aquatic ecosystems. Some of the negative effects oil sands have on aquatic ecosystems are that sometimes oil sands

September 9, 1805, Lewis and Clark as well as others camped at what is present day Weippe, Idaho after nearly dying of starvation in the mountains. The next month the expedition reached the Columbia River where they constructed a large keelboat in Pittsburg. Lewis took the boat down the river to pick up Clark and the rest of the crew along the way, which saved time. On November 7, 1805, Lewis and Clark were twenty miles from the sea, but the men had to put the trip to a halt for three weeks due to the storms. At the sight, Clark wrote in one of his journals, “Ocian in view! O! the joy.” To seal the deal, Mount Hood was visible in the distance proof they were near the ocean.

The St. Johns River is suffering from a significant environmental disaster because of toxic substances from municipal and industrial wastewater, fertilizer runoff, failing septic tanks, and stormwater. Consequently, over 55% of the river miles, 80.4% of acres of large water bodies, 59.4 % of estuaries, and 31.4% of coastline miles do not meet water quality standards in Florida (Florida Department of Environmental Protection 119). For that matter, studying those pollution problems that the river faces is vital since one can use this information to salvage the natural resource which is at the brink of destruction.

They connected snow near the oil sands, whatever ends up in the snow can only get there from above from smoke snacks and dust from the mines (Natural Resources Canada 2013). If there are oil toxins in the snow they must be from industrial activity and within 50km that is exactly what they found (Natural Resources Canada 2013). The industry of the oil sands are releasing 13 toxic heavy metals into the river, which include arsenic, led, mercury, and chromium

The mining processes of the Athabasca oil sands directly affect water resources surrounding the mining pits, specifically the Athabasca River and its tributaries. Water use has been identified by the Alberta Chamber of Resources as a top four challenge of oil sands mining processes (Raynolds et al., 2005). The extraction of bitumen requires freshwater in large quantities, on a scale of 2-4 barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced (Anderson et al., 2010).

The documentary “America’s Ice Age” presented a lot of information, some of which I already knew. However, I also learned a lot of new information, and still have questions about some of what I learned. I learned that nearly two thirds of North America was covered in ice when the largest glaciers were around, and that these glaciers contained 39 thousand cubic miles of water. I also learned that the glaciers left chatter marks, grooves in bedrock caused by glacial plucking, on the top of Bear Mountain, 1280 feet above sea level, which meant that 17 million cubic miles of ice covered North America, equaling about 68 thousand trillion tons. I also learned that a coral stone quarry was found six miles from the current coast in Florida, and one mile down from the

First of all, the mining of bitumen burns enough natural gas every day that can heat 6 million homes. It takes more than 3 million barrels of fresh water a day to produce 1 billion barrels of bitumen, 2 tons of earth excavation and sand to make 1 barrel of bitumen, about 2 tons of tar sands are required to produce 1barrel of oil and then 90% of the polluted water are dumped in the world’s largest impoundments of toxic waste which are the tailing pounds along the Athabasca River. If tar sands growth goes unchecked an area the size of Florida will become a wasteland. A single incident, in 2008, 1,600 ducks died after landing in the tailing pounds of syncrude tar sands mine. It is not only destructive to ancestral lands, habitat, both on land and water but also causes enormous GHG emissions. Data shows that oil sands are Canada’s largest source of CO2 emissions.

The critical part of Alberta’s past, present, and future depend on the drilling rigs on the prairies. Since 1914, when Alberta’s first major oil field was discovered at Turner Valley, oil resources have been a very important facet of the provinces ways of life. Alberta's oil industry is an important part of the provinces economy. It has provided thousands of jobs in production, transportation, refining, distribution, and marketing. Crude oil production has been the third-largest source of

Stoney creek is a salmon spawning stream located on Burnaby Mountain, British Columbia, Canada (The City of Burnaby, 2016). However, the site is constantly being threatened by nearby urban constructions and development (Stoney Creek Environment Committee, n.d.). Thus, organizations were created to protect, maintain and monitor this important salmon rearing stream (Stoney Creek Environment Committee, n.d.). A few methods that the organizations utilize to analyse Stoney Creek, is to survey its habitat conditions and test the water quality and quantity (Taccogna et al., 1995). This will require the assessment of vegetation availability, flow velocity, volume, discharge, water chemistry and conditions (Taccogna et al., 1995). Compiling and documenting

Lake Melville: Avativut, Kanuittailinnivut research program was initiated by the Nunatsiavut Government, the Labrador Inuit self-government body to do more research on the downstream effects. An independent team of scientific experts from Canada and the USA carried out research to fully understand the effects of how Muskrat Falls would impact Lake Melville’s eco-system and the communities that depend on it for a living and also to anticipate the potentially constituting impacts of changing climate. Within the findings is evidence from Harvard University scientists of detrimental impacts on methyl mercury concentration in the Lake Melville ecosystem and increased Inuit exposure to methyl mercury from Muskrat Falls. These findings are substantially different than predictions presented in the Lower Churchill EA by Nalcor Energy. In light of this new scientific evidence, the Nunatsiavut Government has prepared, in this report, a new set of conclusions with respect to the downstream impacts of Muskrat Falls and stemming from this set of science based policy recommendations to protect Inuit health and well-being. (Make Muskrat Right, 2016).

In the past, the global mining industry has experienced many catastrophic breaches of the tailing dams, most recently, failure of the Mount Polley tailings dam in British Columbia in 2014. This has contributed to the publics’ skepticism over management and safety of oil-sands tailing ponds. In an event of tailings dam breach, a huge mass of water and sediments, associated with toxic chemicals will be released, resulting in disastrous environmental and socio-economic impacts. For the particular case of Alberta oil-sands, PI’s recent study of hypothetical tailing-breaches showed that spill of tailing materials into the nearby waters (e.g., Athabasca River) will have a multi-year effect on the water quality and ecosystem several hundred kilometers

Less than a hundred years later, in 1875 the first ever government-sponsored geological study was carried out by John Macoun. Charles Mair, a recording secretary traveling with the David Laird Treaty expedition of 1899, described the future of Athabasca river region as 'substance of great economic value '. In his words "when the hour of development comes, it will, I believe will prove out to be a wonder of North Canada". He even mentioned the boiling process, which was then used to liberate oil from the oil sands mixture. The same process, with technological advancement, is used today in most of the oil production industry (1).

The video provides some insight with satellite imagery in the form of zone coloring with the arctic ice environment being describable in temperature and moistening terms. This is in addition to physical parameters as a great bearing on the structures of life in their ability of inhabitation of certain region. The arctic ice environment is shown to comprise of living organisms on earth emanating from the provision of life as observed in tropical forests as well as the world's photosynthetic phytoplankton within the oceans.