Innovation Anthology #538:

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At the recent CONRAD Symposium on oil sands reclamation, Marty Yarmuch presented the concept of an integrated watershed approach to soil reclamation.

Marty is a soil scientist with Syncrude’s Environmental Research Group.

As he explains, reclamation requires construction of new landscapes at an unprecedented scale.

So the oil sands companies are working in collaboration with scientists from various disciplines to understand how an entire watershed works. In essence, how the different landforms talk to one another.

MARTY YARMUCH: These are large scale disturbances and so we can’t think of each area working alone in isolation. At the end of the operation in the closure landscape, everything ties into each other. Water moves around and nutrients, salts, they all move around in the landscape. And so we have to understand how a landform behaves and then how it will interact with the surrounding disturbances that are around them as landforms, as well as to the undisturbed landscape that’s in the surrounding region.

The studies will help oil sands companies understand the risks of reclamation, and mitigate processes like salt migration.

Thanks today to Syncrude.

I’M CHERYL CROUCHER

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Syncrude

Program Date: 2013-02-28