Hacker News Reader

link seems to be unavailable now

They have an erroneous trailing semicolon. If you remove that, the link works fine.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_sands_tailings_p...

Fixed, thanks.

Wow. Growing up in Alberta I heard so much about the tar sands in my mind they were huge. Yet that link shows them to be pretty small and localized to North of Fort Mac.

77 square kilometre for the ponds and 220 square kilometres for the ponds and structures. What would you call big that seems huge to me?

Growing up in Alberta the oil sands were such a big part of everyday life it sounded like half the province was mines. Yet 220km squared is only 20x11km, or 40 average sized farms. Of which there are about 50k farms in Alberta.

Sure its large compared to my house, but my house isn't worth billions nor does my house power a significant portion of the countries energy needs.

Compare that to the metro region of Calgary: 5,110.21 km squared.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com