Athabasca Oil Sands
September 12th, 2012
The Athabasca Oil Sands is an area of large bitumen (heavy crude oil) deposits located in northeastern Alberta. The Athabasca Oil Corporation, founded in 2006, is the company who controls the development of the oil sands and its resources. On average, they rake in an annual profit of $1.48 billion, making it one of Canada’s biggest money makers and most valuable businesses.
However, research has shown that the oil sands have been bring arsenic, lead, mercury, and bitumen to the surface of the water in the Athabasca Lake in Alberta. Even though there is a very low concentration of these substances, there can be long term serious impacts as a result of it.
In Dr. David Schindler’s, an American/Canadian limnologist at the Univeristy of Alberta, experiment, he took snow from within a 50km radius of a certain area in the oil sands. This snow could be used to analyze if there were oil pollutants coming from oil activity and how much of it was going into the atmosphere. Schindler and his team of scientist went to very careful measures to analyze the snow. The results were jaw-dropping. They found a substantial amount of toxin particulate in the snow. Over a course of four months of snow fall, they found 11,400 metric tons of particulate deposited in the snow. They also discovered that 64% of the particulate came from bitumen build up.
And my question is simply…why? Why would anyone continue with such a business that is so toxic to the environment, the people and the community?
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2011/tippingpoint/