Welcome to my blog for 525! I’ll start off my blog with a brief intro to oi sands, which has been a topic of great interest and heavily invested into by the government in Canada, in terms of the environment.

I have studied oil sands at Environment Canada, and it is a big project that will continue for quite awhile. Environment Canada conducts tests on water in tailing ponds for contaminants found in precipitation in the region.

To give a sense of what the effects of contaminants from oil sands are, this is a photo of a whitefish with a tumour, which was collected downstream from the oilsands industrial area.

As you can see, the effects of contamination from oil sands can be detrimental to the ecosystem, and here is just one example of what it does to fish. How will this play a role and have an effect on humans and the environment in the long-term and short-term?