The Alberta oil sands are one of Canada’s largest sources of oil and may be the biggest petroleum deposit anywhere in the world. But the oil sands industry has a lot of environmental impacts. The oil sands are one of the major causes of air pollution in Canada and North America. A sticky mixture called Bitumen (which is also known as tar) doesn’t flow easily like petroleum or crude oil so companies have to resort to surface mining (strip or open pit mining) which is bad for the environment because it removes landscapes, agricultural lands and destroys forests which leads erosion and then when it rains it washes the topsoil into streams which pollutes the water. Another method is injecting steam to get it out of the Earth. The extraction of
