525 First Week

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.

University of Alberta scientist David Schindler holds a whitefish with a tumour, collected from the Athabasca watershed, downstream from the oilsands industrial development.

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?

 

3 thoughts on “525 First Week

  1. Thanks for sharing what you did in your internship.

    I am curious. Which aspects of oil sands did you study? the contaminants from extraction?… Did you need to collect data too?

    Was that a fish you caught from the downstream of the oil sands industry? did you catch a bunch of fish at a time and saw this one? Was it in Alberta?

    If you know, is there any abatement standard the oil sands industry need to follow?

    I am curious.. if you have time to answer my questions. Thanks!

  2. Hi Lisa. It is a interesting topic. Looking forward more reports in our blog.
    Check out your facebook. I think there are plenty of interesting resource on it.

  3. Hi Lisa, this is a interesting topic. Looking forward more reports on your blogs in the future. Check out Facebook. I think many of our classmates share a lot of useful information on it.

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