Our Solar System Part 10: More Than Just Planets and a Star

Between 1930 and 1992, our solar system seemed fairly straightforward: a star around which 9 planets and an asteroid belt orbited, and a number of comets with long orbits that periodically travelled close enough to the Sun put on a show for us as they flew past Earth. This beautiful contemporary orrery shows the Sun plated in gold, Earth as a blue glass sphere and our moon as a pearl. These devices, run with a clock-like mechanism, were all the rage in the 1700's and 1800's. This one, a replica, can be purchased new today.

Our universe seemed to fit quite nicely into a planetarium and it was easy to conclude that nothing but a vacuum existed past Pluto, except for populations of impossibly distant stars that seemed of no consequence to us here.

Then a lot of things changed, beginning with our realization that space was not just vast nothingness. Instead, it wielded threats such as extinction-level comets and meteors

The image above is an artist's conception of a large meteor that struck North America approximately 65 million years ago and triggered the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.

and gamma ray bursts from supernovae.

Above is an artist's illustration of the gamma ray burst GRB 080319B, detected in 2008. It took place 7.5 billion light years away and even from that incredible distance it was so bright it could be seen by the naked eye.

We learned that our solar system began with chaos and destruction.

This is an artist's conception of the solar nebula, from which the protoplanetary disc would emerge and the planets and other objects would form. The Sun is igniting into a star as the temperature and pressure within its core become sufficient to fuse hydrogen into helium.

Orbiting bodies other than planets and moons were observed - grey areas began to erupt, culminating with the controversial decision to demote Pluto from a planet in 2006. The last century and this one signify a period of rapid evolution of knowledge about our solar system, and we are living right in the fascinating thick of it.

The Search for Planet X

Things began to unravel in the early 1900's when astronomer Percival Lowell found discrepancies in his measurements of the orbits of the outer planets. This led him to believe that an unknown planet must orbit beyond Neptune. and he spent his last years trying to find it. He didn't succeed but after his death his observatory continued his search and eventually found a body orbiting where it was predicted to be, based on the calculated gravitational displacement acting on Uranus and Neptune. In 1930, they named it Pluto, after the Greek god of the underworld. However, astronomers grew increasingly skeptical that this small planet had enough mass to affect the orbits of two giant planets. At the time they thought Pluto was Earth-sized and even that mass would not be enough to have any effect. In 1978, a satellite was discovered orbiting Pluto (its moon, Charon, both of which are visible in the following 1990 photo taken by the Hubble telescope) and this discovery made it possible to accurately measure Pluto's mass.

As suspected, Pluto was found to be inconsequentially small, in fact far smaller than even their predictions. Something else was tugging at the two giant ice worlds. In the meantime, soon after Pluto was discovered, astronomers began to speculate that this planet might not be alone. A search led to the discovery of an entire population of comet-like bodies orbiting between Jupiter and Neptune. However, rather than settling the question about the perturbation of the ice giant's orbits, the discovery of these bodies raised even more questions. These icy bodies, called centaurs, were found to have unstable orbits and they were calculated to have lifetimes of only a few million years.

A New Object: Centaur

Centaurs are unusual objects. They are technically minor planets that share characteristics with both comets and asteroids. A minor planet is an object in direct orbit around the Sun that is neither a classical planet (like Jupiter) nor a comet. Minor planets include dwarf planets, all of which I will define in more detail shortly. Centaurs, named after mythical half horse/half human creatures, are known to cross the orbits of the giant planets, and there are many of them. Our solar system is filled with more than 44,000 of these objects, each of which is larger than 1 km across (the largest being a massive 260 km in diameter). The first centaur was discovered in 1920 and they were first classified as a group in 1977. In this image, centaurs are labeled orange, while all Kuiper Belt objects are bright green (we will be investigating the Kuiper Belt shortly as well).

Perhaps even more strange is that centaurs come in a whole range of colours. This challenges any model of surface composition, but it could be attributed to either composition, origin and/or space weathering. Some of these objects demonstrate comet-like behavior such as a comet-like tail as they near the Sun during their orbit. It should be kept in mind that these are examples of grey-area objects - there is no clear line of distinction between centaurs, comets or asteroids. Much more data on these puzzling objects is needed.

As suggested earlier, the discovery of centaurs raised an obvious question: How could they still exist billions of years after the solar system's (and therefore their) formation? Some outer reservoir of ice must be regularly replenishing them, but what?

In the meantime, in the 1950's, astronomers began to also wonder why comets are still so plentiful in the solar system.  Like centaurs, they were well known to have finite lifespans because their surfaces sublimate* into space every time they draw near the Sun. Comets are small icy bodies, usually less than 50 km across, that display a visible coma (a thin fuzzy temporary atmosphere), the result of sublimation of their icy surfaces into gas when they are struck by sufficient solar radiation. They may also sport a tail visible from Earth as they near the Sun, which is composed of dust that reflects sunlight and gases that glow because they are ionized by solar radiation.

*Comets loose a great deal of mass when they pass near the Sun! For example, Halley's Comet lost 5 x 10¹¹ kg of mass last time it made a close pass.  Extrapolated data, assuming the comet's orbit doesn't change, means that Halley will be gone in 170,000 years. Halley's Comet, its bright tail visible to the naked eye, has streamed past Earth once every 75-76 years ever since it was first recorded in 240 BC. This is what it looked like when we last saw it in 1986.

Comets have been of particular interest to scientists ever since a theory was proposed that Earth's vast reservoir of water might have come from multiple comet impacts during a period early in Earth's history called the Late Heavy Bombardment, and that organic compounds within comets might also have seeded young Earth with the building blocks of life. NASA launched a robotic probe to sample the coma of a comet in 1999. It met up one called Wild 2 in 2004 and collected dust grain samples from the comet's coma. Scientists found a wide range of organic compounds, including two that contain biologically usable forms of nitrogen. In 2005, NASA launched another comet probe, the Deep Impact Spacecraft. This one impacted a comet, creating a large crater in it so that it could remove samples from the comet's interior to send back to Earth to analyze.

The image above is an artist's conception of the Deep Impact Spacecraft landing on the surface of the 370 kg comet called Tempel 1.

They were surprised by the amount of dust inside the comet, which was fine like talcum powder rather than coarse as expected, like sand. They were puzzled to find clays and carbonates, which usually need liquid water to form as well as sodium, which is very rare in space. This dust is debris from the solar system's most distant and coldest regions that formed 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists suspect that Tempel 1 came from a region far past Neptune, based on the amount of low temperature ices, such as ethane, that it contained. This puts it in a group of comets called long-period comets.

There must be a large reservoir of icy bodies very far away from the Sun to explain the origin of these long-period comets, comets that have orbits lasting thousands of years. This suspected reservoir, named the Oort Cloud and first hypothesized by Jan Oort in 1950, is believed to extend into the extreme far reaches of the solar system. This belt is the home of long-period comets but it cannot account for the orbits of short-period comets, of which Halley's Comet is one. In 1988, a Canadian team of astrophysicists ran computer simulations of all observed comets. A group of short-period comets came from an area that was consistently in the same plane as the solar system, whereas Oort Cloud comets came from any point in the sky. This meant that a belt of comets must exist in the same plane as our system, and this has come to be known as the Kuiper Belt. This artist's rendering of the Oort cloud and the Kuiper Belt might help you visualize where these two areas are located in our solar system, and how large they are.

Deciphering the Asteroid Belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud

All three of these zones contain small bodies, or remnants, from the birth of our solar system.

Asteroid Belt

The Asteroid Belt, by far the innermost belt of objects, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, is illustrated in the following diagram. 

It contains many asteroids, ranging in size from 950 km in diameter to the size of a dust grain, which are so thinly distributed that several unmanned spacecraft have so far traversed it without incident. Asteroids, also sometimes called planetoids especially the larger ones, are generally what we refer to as the bodies that make up the Asteroid Belt.

This is a composite image of asteroids that have been imaged at high resolution.

Vesta, with a diameter of 530 km, dwarfs the other asteroids and is sometimes called a protoplanet. It may be just massive enough to form a sphere and its interior is thought to be differentiated. Its shape is being investigated and if it is determined that this body maintains hydrostatic equilibrium, it will be reclassified as a dwarf planet. The Dawn Mission sent by NASA, is currently investigating Vesta and afterward it will investigate the dwarf planet, Ceres, shown below with both Vesta (left) and Ceres (right) in this artist's concept).

The asteroids, composed mostly of rock and metal with some sporting an icy mantle, are made up of the same stuff as planets and might have accreted into a planet long ago if they had not been so energized by the gravitational field around Jupiter. Collisions between these asteroids were so violent that they shattered on impact instead of sticking together. They were much more numerous and disordered when the solar system was very young. Many collisions occurred and, over time, most asteroids shot off in different directions, decreasing the mass of the belt to what we see today. Most of these asteroids orbit around 2.7 AU (Earth-Sun distance) from the Sun. This is an interesting distance because it is here where the Sun formed a "snow line" when the belt was forming, the same period during which planets were forming. Chunks of rock that formed beyond this radius were able to accumulate water ice. This belt contains short-period comets within its outer regions. The difference between comets and asteroids is that asteroids come from the warmer inner solar system and are composed mostly of rock and metal. Comets come from the colder outer solar system and are composed of water and other ices, rock and organic compounds. Short-period comets, much more plentiful and volatile in this belt's youth, may have supplied Earth with its water (adding significantly to the outgassing of water vapour from Earth's interior).

Kuiper Belt

The Kuiper Belt is much farther out than the Asteroid Belt, extending from Neptune's orbit (30 AU) to about 55 AU from the Sun. Objects here are similar to those of the Asteroid Belt except that rather than being made up mostly of rock and metal these contain mostly frozen methane, ammonia and water. This belt also contains objects large enough to be classified as dwarf planets. Recall that the Kuiper Belt was first hypothesized as recently as 1988. No one is yet sure how it came to be. Astrophysicists are attempting to answer this question by using new wide-field survey telescopes to find more Kuiper Belt objects (KBO's). So far, they believe that these objects, like those of the Asteroid Belt, are remnants from the original protoplanetary disc around the just-formed Sun and that they failed to coalesce into planets. The largest KBO is less than 3000 km in diameter, too small to meet the requirements of a planet. And, like the Asteroid Belt, gravitation from Jupiter is the most likely culprit. Interestingly, recent computer simulations suggest that neither Neptune nor Uranus formed in situ out here. There wasn't enough raw material even when this belt was young to form them. The Nice Model is the model most often cited to explain the migration of these giant planets from more inner orbits close to Jupiter to their present locations. The repositioning of Neptune and Uranus is thought to have occurred when Jupiter shifted into a powerful 2:1 resonance with Saturn, destabilizing the orbits of the two ice giants. The planetary jostling probably threw many early KBO's into disorder, shooting them off in different directions and depleting the population. Keep in mind that the Nice Model is still a work in progress. It is not without its problems in terms of explaining the location and motion of all the current objects in the solar system – our solar system is an extremely complicated system that challenges even the latest modeling hardware and software.

Oort Cloud

Even though scientists have suspected its existence for over 60 years now, there has yet been no confirmed evidence for the Oort Cloud. One reason for this is that this cloud is very very far away, 50,000 AU. That is about a thousand times further from the Sun than the Kuiper Belt, or almost ¼ of the way to the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri. The Oort cloud defines the limit of our solar system, where the Sun's gravitational force is gradually overcome by the tug of passing stars and the tug of the Milky Way itself, forces at play in local interstellar space. Like the Kuiper Belt, objects that comprise this zone are primarily composed of water, ammonia and methane ices, and they are suspected to have been remnants scattered far out into space by the gravitational forces of the giant planets in the early solar system. This is the hypothetical home of long-period comets, as well as many centaurs. Only four objects, all with highly eccentric orbits have so far been considered as possible members of the Oort group.

If you do some quick internet research you will find other structures of the solar system such as the Scattered Disc and Detached Objects, but the above three main zones of objects hopefully give you a general idea of how the system is set up, keeping in mind that our system did not form itself into discrete objects and zones for our categorical ease. It is our challenge to describe and understand its various indistinct and often puzzling attributes in order to build a picture of how what we see today came to be and what it's future might look like. The following image attempts to put these structures of our solar system into perspective.

Sedna, a dwarf planet past Pluto, is the most distant known object in our solar system, with a highly elliptical orbit ranging between 76 AU and 937 AU, and is used for reference in the above diagram.

Pluto

Pluto is an object of the Kuiper Belt. Lowell's "Planet X," and its four moons, along with many other recently discovered bodies of similar mass as Pluto such as Chiron, Eris, and Ceres, constitute a group of at least 50 and perhaps more than 200 dwarf planets orbiting our solar system within the Kuiper belt. Either all of these would have to be classified as planets or Pluto would have to be reclassified, and so these objects are now known as dwarf planets. The new term, "dwarf planet" refers to any body orbiting the Sun that has enough mass to form a spherical shape under its own gravity (called hydrostatic equilibrium) but not enough gravitational force to clear the neighbourhood around its orbit of debris, and is not a satellite (a satellite is any body that orbits a planet or other body more massive than itself; moons are also called satellites and the distinction between the two terms is often unclear). The second criterion, clearing its orbit, might seem to be a bit subjective and it is. A more massive classical planet has enough mass to gravitationally interact with other bodies within its orbit and eventually cause these smaller bodies to accrete with it, be distributed to another orbit or be captured as a satellite (a moon) or into a resonant orbit (an example of resonant orbit is a special 1:1 orbit. A number of asteroids have the same orbital period as Neptune and follow the same orbital path. This helps define Neptune as a planet - none of the dwarf planets has enough mass to attract any other bodies into resonant orbit).

Pluto is tiny, only about one fifth the mass of our moon, and, along with other dwarf planets, is likely made up of about 60% rock and 40% ice. It may have a differentiated core because it has a large enough portion of rock, and therefore radioactive material, to heat the ice enough to allow the ice and rock to separate from each other. The ice mantle may still be warm enough to allow a subsurface liquid ocean up to 180 km thick to encircle the dwarf planet. It may have a thin exosphere of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide. This is an artist's impression of what Pluto's (frozen nitrogen) surface might look like, with the Sun and one of its moons, Charon, in the sky:

Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

Pluto circles the Sun only once every 248 Earth Years, in a highly inclined eccentric orbit that places it between 30 AU, as close as Neptune, and 49 AU.

Past Pluto

If you traveled out into the most distant reaches of our solar system, you would eventually run into the interstellar medium. Notice that I did not say empty space. Our solar wind travels outward from the Sun in all directions at about 400 km/s (that's 1,440,000 km/h!) until it collides with interstellar wind. Interstellar wind is the outward flow of gas, dust and radiation from all the other stars in the Milky Way neighbourhood. The interstellar medium is all that exists in the space in between stars, such as gases in ionic, atomic and molecular forms (99% of matter), as well as dust (1% of matter) and cosmic radiation (it is comprised of both matter and energy). Interstellar space is not a perfect vacuum, but it is extremely dilute, making it a much better vacuum in any practical sense than we can make in a laboratory. Within the densest regions of interstellar medium, inside molecular gas clouds, stars form. Where it is most dilute, few or no stars exist. The collision between solar wind and the interstellar wind is called termination shock, about 90 AU from the Sun upwind and 200 AU from the Sun downwind. The solar wind at this juncture slows, condenses and grows turbulent. Particles become highly energetic in this region. Both Voyager 1 and 2 have just recently passed termination shock. Past termination shock, the pressures of the solar wind and opposing interstellar wind are in balance and this marks the heliopause and the beginning of interstellar space. You can think of the heliosphere as a gigantic bubble surrounding all the planets inflated by solar wind (which itself is powered by the Sun's vast and powerful magnetic field that protects us from deadly galactic radiation). As the heliosphere with the solar system encapsulated inside it plows through space, a bow shock forms in front of it, just like water bunching up in front of a big rock in a stream. This artist's view depicts several structures associated with our heliosphere.

In the center you can see the Sun and the planetary orbits. The edge of the bubble encasing them is termination shock. Voyagers 1 and 2 have just crossed this boundary. The region outside it is called the heliosheath and it is bound by the heliopause. Beyond this region to the left are orange bunched up molecular gas clouds. This marks the bow shock, where galactic radiation collides with our Sun's heliosphere. Right now our Sun is travelling through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a gas/dust cloud about 30 light years across that flows outward from a star-forming region called the Scorpius-Centaurus Association within the Milky Way.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now about 94 AU from the Sun. Having successfully traversed the Asteroid Belt and flown past Jupiter and Saturn, it took the first ever "family portrait" of our solar system as seen from outside (at about 40 AU from Earth) before it embarked on its current Interstellar Mission. The solar system's family portrait is shown below.

This picture is a mosaic of 60 frames. Six planets are visible in the mosaic and labeled. An image of Earth in this mosaic, famously called "The Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan, was captured from about 6 billion km away. It is the very tiny speck just visible halfway down the brown band to the right within the darkness of space in the image below.

Observing our planet, I leave it to you to feel either uncomfortably inconsequential or, borrowing from the movie, "Contact," rare and precious.

Voyager 1 is now the most distant man-made object in the universe. It is now within the heliosheath and sending back data daily thanks to its long–lived nuclear batteries, which are expected to last until around 2020, at which point it should have entered interstellar space.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, A NASA satellite, was launched in 2008 to explore the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. So far, data has revealed a completely unexpected result: a very narrow very bright ribbon of energetic neutral atoms created by interactions between the solar wind and the galactic wind, which seems to be in continuous flux. These findings will certainly help us refine our concepts about the outer solar system boundary.

A Link Between the Oort Cloud and Extinction Events

The Oort cloud is thought to extend far beyond the heliosphere, from about 5000 AU to about 50,000 AU from the Sun. The generally slowly moving objects that make up this cloud are still weakly bound by the Sun's gravity. However, comets in the outer regions of the Oort cloud are also influenced by galactic tidal forces, and these often complex forces may have a significant effect on comet activity. As many as 90% of all comets originating from the Oort cloud may be the result of perturbations caused by the galactic tide. The galactic tide is a tidal force acting on all objects within the gravitational field of the Milky Way. Passing stars and molecular clouds are also sources of comet perturbations. There may be a link between high comet activity and the location of the Sun within the Milky Way. The Sun orbits the galaxy center, revolving on the outskirts within the Orion spiral arm as shown below.

Computer models show that the Sun bobs up and down through the plane of the Milky Way as it revolves around the galaxy. As we pass through the densest part of the plane, once every 35 to 45 million years, increased gravitational forces from surrounding giant gas and dust clouds tend to dislodge more comets from their paths, increasing the probability that one or more will be sent hurtling toward Earth. Evidence from craters on Earth and the record of past extinction events, the latest of which was the Cretaceous-Tertiary Event 65.5 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs, lends support to this theory. Our present position in the galaxy suggests that we are due for another "active" period. Another related but opposing theory suggests that the solar system is barraged by as much as 24 times more interstellar radiation every 60 million years or so, when it bobs up out of the plane of the Milky Way and exposes its "head," putting greater stress on the biosphere and possibly leading to mass extinctions. In this case, while we are on the upswing now, we are about 10 million years off of any significant increase in cosmic ray exposure. It's entirely possible that both of these long-term variations in the solar system environment have and will continue to contribute to our environment on Earth.

A Brief Look Into the Future

I think the traditional view of the solar system is that it is steadfast and ever unchanging and in an effort to challenge this view I may have left you with the impression that it is dangerously unstable and chaotic. Despite its early chaos it is in fact a very stable system. The positions of the planets have settled into resonant orbits that keep them in place quite nicely and are expected to continue to do so for a very long time, until our Sun begins to expand into a Red Giant. The Sun is growing brighter as it evolves, at a rate of increase of 10% every billion years. One billion years from now, Earth will be too hot as a result of this process to sustain liquid water on its surface and it will no longer be considered habitable. By that time, numerous comet and asteroid impacts will have left heir marks on various planets and Earth will have evolved through several long-term and dramatic changes in climate and habitability much as it has undergone in the past. The orbits of the major bodies will have shifted as well. In fact, our extremely precise long-term computer models of orbital rotation in the solar system will be valid for only about 10 million years before small but consistent chaotic changes will be sufficient to throw them off. Any immediate threats to human life from within and from outside our solar system are very remote. I urge you to relax and enjoy our lovely backyard and explore the neighbourhood.

Alberta's Oil Sands: A Primer On the Industry and its Impact

I, an Albertan, have a front-row seat to an energy battle that is rapidly reaching epic proportions. During the past year, international interest in the oil sands has exploded and not in a good way. Canada, and specifically Alberta's Oil Sands, did not come out looking very good in both local and international media at the last International Climate Conference in Copenhagen. A media campaign called ReThink Alberta, launched last summer by Corporate Ethics International, an American organization, depicts Northern Alberta's transformation from a beautiful wildlife sanctuary into a dirty wildlife-killing wasteland. You can see the associated video as well as Alberta Environment minister Rob Renner's response here. This group also posted giant billboards of dying birds soaked in oil in many major American cities.

To try to neutralize these horrific images, our premier, Ed Stelmach, launched a political junket in Washington, encouraging Americans in power to realize that our bitumen is there for the offer as an environmentally safe source of energy from a politically friendly neighbour. The BP offshore oil disaster had recently occurred and this helped Alberta sell the oil sands as a safer alternative, but it also brought into focus the general danger of the world relying on oil for energy. Alberta is mired in controversy over our oil sands industry. It is blamed for both global warming and local pollution. Recent deaths of hundreds of migratory birds that landed on poisonous tailings ponds circulated in the media and led several local politicians and environmental protection groups around the world to question how effectively the industry protects wildlife. Some independent researchers are now making it their mission to study the effects of the industry on the ecosystem as well as on the people that live nearby. A Nature of Things Special TV presentation called Tipping point: The Age of the Oil Sands (watch the entire episode here), hosted by scientist and environmental activist, David Suzuki, brought these concerns into focus. Meanwhile the Alberta government has launched a series of advertisement campaigns both in Alberta and internationally to promote efforts made by the oil sands industry to reduce its environmental impact. The oil sands industry is expected to triple by 2015.

Albertans are growing more polarized in their opinions about the oil sands. We are becoming mired down in a media/public relations storm of opinions and pseudofacts at a critical time when we need to, and still have a window of opportunity to, influence the industry's fate: We can

1) embrace the industry wholeheartedly or

2) accept the industry conditionally with strict environmental protection measures in place or

3) pressure the industry to stop the expansion or

4) shut it down entirely.

By "we" I mean the Canadian government, the only body that has the jurisdiction to enforce restrictions, in response to our public pressure (and perhaps the Alberta government as well).

A middle road could be envisioned where the Canadian government and public pressure compel the industry into placing its expansion efforts on hold while it takes an intermediate step of finding and incorporating new technologies that reduce its environmental damage to a level that is agreeable to all parties, including the Albertan public and specifically the people living nearby and downstream of the Athabasca river, who are most affected by the industry, as well as international environmental groups and all levels of government. This step would require a unprecedented level of transparency, coordination of information sharing and cooperation from the industry and the industry must assume the risk that if no acceptable technologies can be found that will mitigate the environmental damage, for example if the tailings ponds cannot be fully reclaimed in a reasonable time period or if the stress on the fresh water systems cannot be reduced to an acceptable limit, then the industry will suffer a severe setback. However, if the industry successfully embraces the environmental challenges brought forth and works hard toward transparency and cooperation then both the public and investors can hail the industry for its forward-thinking and environmentally responsible reputation. There may be a way for the world to use the enormous reserve of oil sands energy for many years to come as we gradually wean ourselves from nonrenewable energy. The expense of oil sands oil, made higher because the environmental technology must be added to the cost, might help drive that ultimate transition. I urge you to keep these possibilities in mind as we explore the details and to determine for yourself which response is the best fit. Or perhaps you will have your own solution not addressed here.

First, both the public and the government (and company shareholders!) need to be properly informed about the science of the oil sands and the science of the environmental mitigation technologies that could be used, such as carbon capture technology, for example.

The Need for Energy

We in the industrialized world have become accustomed to a very high standard of living that consumes a great deal of energy, and countries like India and China, with far greater populations, are quickly evolving toward a similar standard. I, a typical Canadian, consume the energy equivalent of about 8200 kg of oil per year. That's close to about 10 barrels of sweet crude oil. If I multiply that by 34 million people in Canada, we as a country consume 340 million barrels of oil per year personally. We have to add industry and public consumption to this figure so we arrive at a total Canadian consumption of 730 million barrels of oil per year (using 2009 numbers). Alberta has total bitumen-based oil reserves in excess of 170 billion barrels, the second largest reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia, with a current production of over 1 million barrels of oil per day from bitumen reserves.

In reality we don't consume just oil for energy. In Canada, only about 32% of our energy comes from oil. A quarter each comes from natural gas and hydroelectric power, 10% comes from coal and the rest, 8%, comes from nuclear and renewable sources. Click here to see how Canada energy usage compares to the rest of the world. Unlike many other countries, particularly Germany, biofuels, wind and solar energy, are only used marginally in Canada, so far.  However, even countries serious about greening up like Germany have a long way to go to wean themselves from fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas. Renewables account for 6% of Germany's total energy consumption compared to 1% here in Canada.

What Is Wrong with Fossil Fuels?

Fossil fuels provided the energy that made the industrial revolution possible, from coal-fueled steam turbines to the combustion engine. We would not be where we are today without them. But fossil fuels come with problems. They are a finite nonrenewable resource. The earth has only so much stored energy deposited in ancient reservoirs. Perhaps an even more urgent problem with these fuels is that they, as a result of their extraction and refinement as well as eventual combustion, release pollutants into the ecosystem, damaging it and creating health concerns for us. Most importantly of all, fossil fuels are strongly linked to global warming, a global threat not only to our survival but to the survival of all species. This will be discussed in more detail shortly.

The bitumen extracted from the oil sands in northern Alberta is a fossil fuel and it comes with these problems. And, as we will soon explore, bitumen has additional environmental hurdles to overcome as well.

How Do The Oil Sands Stack Up As a Sustainable Energy Source?

With an eye to making a significant shift toward sustainability, we can view the oil sands from a perspective that enables us to question its role in our future energy, rather than blindly accepting this familiar argument:

1) Our society is in danger of collapsing as the world runs out of energy.

2) The world is running out of energy and some of that energy must come from oil.

3) All remaining oil reserves including the oil sands must be exploited.

Can bitumen from the oil sands be incorporated into an energy mix that is sustainable from a long-term perspective?

What Bitumen Is

Bitumen is a naturally occurring mixture of heavy hydrocarbons. Like oil, it was created under great heat and pressure over millions of years from the biomass of ancient algae and other living organisms that once thrived during the cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago. It is, in fact, oil that is in the process of escaping to the Earth's surface and in that process it has been exposed to, and partly degraded by, bacteria.

From Bitumen to Synthetic Oil

The shorter hydrocarbon chains of bitumen were destroyed first as they were exposed to surface bacteria and what remains is a sticky black semisolid that consists of large highly branched hydrocarbon molecules which must be cracked, or broken, into smaller hydrocarbon molecules and then refined into usable synthetic crude oil, which I will refer to as syncrude in this article. Northern Alberta's bitumen, along with substantial natural gas deposits, resides in the Upper Devonian Grosmont formation. This deposit contains an estimated 50 billion cubic metres of heavy crude bitumen.

Bitumen, like all energy sources, can ultimately be traced back to energy from the Sun. During photosynthesis, algae and other plants trap light energy in chemical bonds where it is stored. When ancient plants died, their biomass was slowly converted into crude oil, natural gas and coal, depending on which conditions and geologic processes they underwent. These fossilized organic hydrocarbons contain energy stored in their carbon bonds. When they are burned, a combustion reaction takes place. The carbon bonds are destroyed, releasing water, carbon dioxide and energy. This is where the concern over global warming comes in.

Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming

Carbon in the form of atmospheric carbon dioxide acts as a thermal blanket over the Earth, trapping heat from the Sun inside the atmosphere and warming the planet. There is naturally a certain level of this so-called greenhouse gas and while it has varied naturally over the eons, it tends toward a state of equilibrium in which it varies little over thousands of years. If atmospheric carbon dioxide rises rapidly, however, as it has over the past decade, it not only puts tremendous strain on ecosystems, strains that could lead to potential mass extinctions of species because they cannot adapt fast enough to survive and reproduce, but it rapidly changes the chemistry of the oceans as well, causing, among other things, coral reefs and shellfish shells to dissolve, species which are important ecological anchors to the entire ocean ecosystem. On top of this, vast oceanic ice shelves in Antarctica and terrestrial glaciers all over the world are melting quickly and contributing to rising sea levels. This is already beginning to threaten coastal cities and development around the world. Finally, global warming is destroying the glaciers on which many populations, including ours here in Alberta, rely for fresh water, and contributing to increased drought and flood stress on agriculture around the world. The relationship between carbon dioxide and global warming is explored in depth in my article, "Earth's Atmosphere Part 8 – How To Care For Earth's Atmosphere."

Synthetic petroleum production from bitumen mining is a carbon-positive industry. A great deal of carbon that was once chemically bound up is released into the atmosphere. In order to slow down global warming or perhaps eventually stop it altogether, we need to reduce the world's carbon footprint to zero. Unfortunately, carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase globally. Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, future climate change is inevitable and we ourselves, will face challenges to our way of life to which we will have to adapt. Ever-increasing worldwide greenhouse gas emissions could lead to run-way global warming, a catastrophic series of possible future scenarios based on climate modeling. It remains a controversial idea despite support by a large consensus of climate researchers.

In an article written for Scientific American in 1998 by Richard George, CEO and director of Suncor Energy Inc., the process by which bitumen is mined and processed into syncrude is introduced. The article also provides an interesting pre-media-storm history of the oil sands that helps to put the industry into perspective. Bitumen must be strip mined, extracted from its sandy aggregate, upgraded into syncrude, and then shipped to refineries which turn it into usable fuels, all of which require energy, much of which comes from natural gas in Alberta. All of this adds to bitumen's carbon footprint, which I have found very difficult to pin down in my research. According to a study referenced in Wikipedia, the bitumen to liquid fuel process generates about 3 times the amount of greenhouse gases per barrel as the production of crude oil, 86 kg CO₂ per barrel of oil compared to 29 kg CO₂ per barrel, respectively. Alberta's oil sands are becoming Canada's fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions according to the World Wildlife Foundation and the Pembina Institute, which give the oil sands a failing grade because the Canadian government has not yet regulated its carbon emissions with any absolute targets.

Future Plans for The Oil Sands

Canadian bitumen is upgraded into syncrude, which can then be refined into gasoline (usually about 50% goes into this), diesel fuel, jet fuel, heating oil and kerosene. Much of the syncrude will ultimately be destined for refineries in the Midwest and the Texas Gulf, which are currently being retrofitted, an investment of $20 billion, to turn syncrude into fuel. Alberta has several upgraders northeast of Edmonton with plans to install a new one, at a cost of $5 billion, with the capacity to process diesel fuel and talks are underway for a future $5 billion refinery in Alberta so that more profits can be kept at home. A $5.5 billion new pipeline is also being considered, called the Northern Gateway Pipeline. Syncrude would be piped to Kitimat, British Columbia where it would be shipped to large and rapidly growing Pacific Rim markets. The proposaI is facing tremendous opposition from First Nations people who own the land it would traverse as well as environmental groups.

A From-Bitumen-to-Cars Business

These future plans are not without controversy. The United States has about 250 million cars on its roads, most of which run on gasoline, and China currently has almost 200 million cars on the road, a number that is rapidly increasing. Until alternatives like electric cars or fuel cell cars are embraced in significant numbers by major car manufacturers and the public, worldwide demand for syncrude will continue to increase, enough to make the planned tripling of operations here in Alberta economically feasible. Business is essentially an amoral operation. Owners and investors understandably place customer and shareholder satisfaction as their bottom line in a free market society like ours. Inadequate limits placed on the industry by both levels of government here as well as a lack of Canadian will to adhere to the international limits of CO₂ emissions of the Kyoto protocol and a lack of cooperation by both Canada and the United States with the Copenhagen Climate Council makes me wonder if the Canadian government is taking too much luxury maintaining a laissez faire attitude toward the oil sands industry. As we reap the financial rewards will we be leading the world to environmental disaster? We must remember that we as consumers are complicit in the business of oil.

Efforts to Mitigate Environmental Damage

The oil sands industry in Alberta represents an enormous financial investment, estimated at about $140 billion from 1997 to 2010, made by many international companies as well as the Alberta government. If they were shut down tomorrow, the companies as well as Alberta's, and Canada's economies would be seriously affected. Even so, a few Canadian politicians are beginning to publicly ponder shutting down the oil sands.

Sufficient public pressure might influence the oil companies to invest in and implement environmental controls, and that is already beginning to happen.

Carbon Capture and Storage Plan

The Alberta government just announced that it will go ahead with a carbon capture and storage plan, a $2 billion investment. While this technology could significantly reduce CO₂ emissions it will not eliminate them. It will be difficult to implement the technology in a complex system with multiple CO₂ emission points and the technology itself is unproven. Carbon capture and storage has become a public relations necessity for the oil sands in an effort to clean up its "dirty oil" image. The federal and provincial governments strongly support the implementation while environmental groups question its actual effectiveness. This technology doesn't address the pollution attributed to the end-stage burning of the fuels. For example, new technologies, traffic management and changes in car use must be explored and applied. In the meantime, it may take a great deal of time to determine the effectiveness of carbon capture technology.

Reclamation of Former Mines and Tailings Ponds

The oil sands are also engaged in reclamation of oil sands land. Syncrude Canada Ltd. has invested $100 million into this effort over the last five years. Gateway Hill, a reclaimed forest in the former west mine area just north of Fort McMurray was recently opened to the public and is the first to receive government reclamation certification.  How effective this reclamation was is a source of controversy. Reclamation of the industry's tailings ponds is also underway and, in fact, Suncor Energy Inc. recently celebrated its first reclamation of a tailings pond into 220 hectares of wetland. Environmentalists as well as First Nations people living downstream are not impressed however. Dr. Lee Foote, a wetlands specialist and an expert on land reclamation at the University of Alberta, questions whether the new wetland is a functioning ecosystem rather than simply an area that has been made to appear alive and green. Other environmental groups agree that it is too soon to call the site reclaimed. Meanwhile, Suncor has been charged with violating storm water management regulations and there is growing concern that chemicals such as toxic and carcinogenic naphthenic acids and heavy metals from old tailings ponds are leaking into the Athabasca river, the major water supply in the area, as well as local water aquifers. The Pembina Institute, an Alberta environmental watchdog, details what is known about which chemicals are in the tailings ponds as well as the enormity of the area the "ponds" entail. The companies involved in the oil sands industry must find ways to address this unacceptable hazard to both the people who rely on the water supply as well as the ecosystem. Last but not least, reports of the deaths of thousands (per annum) of migratory birds that land in the tailings ponds is seriously damaging the industry's reputation both here and abroad. The full impact on the various species involved, some of which are endangered, for example the whopping crane, is not yet known, nor is a workable solution yet available. Both Suncor and Syncrude have said that their deterrent systems were fully functional when migratory birds recently landed during a freezing rainstorm.

As the world's oil reserves dwindle and oil becomes more expensive, revenue from the oil sands will increase. The companies involved could go a long way toward satisfying a jittery public that they are not ruining the Earth by not only devoting more resources to environmental research but forming a cooperative relationship with independent researchers to allow renowned scientists like freshwater expert Dr. David Schindler, full access to the operations to run fully independent testing, and to hear and respond to the research findings in a fully transparent way. I hope for a solution to the oil sands problem that can reach a compromise between the public vilifying the industry and the industry shutting out the public. I think there is a danger of opposing sides digging in and creating a stagnant impasse that jeopardizes the problem-solving process so badly needed.

The business of the oil sands is impressive. A world-class conglomerate of cooperative companies is coming together to create what will be one of the greatest capitalistic enterprises in history. The industry is well aware that its customers are ultimately us, as we all increasingly consume the fuels refined from bitumen to support our industries and lifestyles. I leave it up to you to decide if it is time to venture into the great energy unknown and trade in your current gasoline-powered car for an electric or hydrogen fuel model, for example. Maybe you already have. I ask you where you think the oil sands industry should be heading. Do you agree with what is happening and, if not, do you think public pressure will succeed in forcing the industry to sufficiently green up or will it succeed only in eliciting superficial responses from the industry which ultimately will have little environmental impact and serve to further muddy the waters of information? Can the world afford to wait and see what the full environmental impact of decades of oil sands production and end-use of its products will be, before governments step up and impose restrictions?

The oil sands industry is on the verge of becoming the largest environmental gamble in history. 50 years from now will we be thankful for the affordable fuel we have had access to, secure knowing that the sky didn't fall after all? Will we look back with regret, living in a mortally wounded world and wondering why we didn't do anything to stop it? Will we look back from an entirely new perspective where the economy, industry, infrastructure and our lifestyles adapted to the end of the fossil fuel age?

Added Note:

I recently watched "Earth: The Operator's Manual," a 1-hour special on climate change and sustainable energy that explores in particular our reliance on oil, natural gas and coal and our alternatives, on PBS (premiered in April, 2011). This is is the most scientifically presented well-rounded treatment I've seen and I highly recommend you view it (click to watch the whole episode below) as you consider Earth's complex energy issues.

Watch the full episode. See more EARTH: The Operators Manual.

Fracking: Alberta's Imminent Disaster

*This article has been updated. See asterisk at the end of this post.

I recently watched a documentary on CBC News Network called Burning Water (aired in October 2010), about the effects from fracking (hydraulic fracturing) on local well water quality in Alberta. I was deeply disturbed and moved by what I saw and I feel compelled to make an effort here to help educate myself as well as fellow Albertans about this industrial process.

What is fracking?

Alberta (and Saskatchewan) is rich in natural gas. A very large reservoir of this gas is locked up within coal thousands of metres deep underground. It is possible to tap this resource by creating a hydraulic fracture within the shale by pumping very high-pressure fluid into the wellbore. The fluid fractures the coal and rock and creates a large surface area in which the gas can permeate out and be captured. The fluid used is mostly fresh water but it also contains a small percentage of chemicals and it is these chemicals that are creating a major controversy both here and in many areas in the United States where the process is also used to extract gas. There is growing evidence that these chemicals can find their way into local water aquifers and contaminate local water supplies.

Most people in the industry claim that fracking has very little potential to contaminate water aquifers because most aquifers are much less deep than the areas in which the fracking is done. In the United States, a study done by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2004 revealed that there is some uncertainty about how fracturing fluid migrates through rocks, and how the seismic activity, which accompanies such drilling, may affect this migration. An act called the FRAC Act was introduced in the U.S. in 2009 in an attempt to force the fracking industry to reveal exactly what is in their fracking fluids. The industry is currently resisting this bill because it considers the recipes for these fluids to be trade secrets.

There has been no investigation into the potential pollution of aquifers by fracking in Canada.

Why is fracking dangerous?

According to two studies done by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Ground Water Protection Council, chemicals used in fracking may include kerosene, benzene, toluene, xylene and formaldahyde. These chemicals, most of which are solvents, may be used either directly in fracking fluid or in other parts of the job.

Some of these chemicals are extremely dangerous even in very low concentrations in water. Benzene is a carcinogen, toluene and xylene are neurotoxins and formaldehyde is both a toxin and a possible carcinogen.

The Burning Water documentary I watched concentrated on a farming family living near Rosebud in southern Alberta. Encana, Canada's largest gas company, had recently begun drilling several fracking wells under and near their farm and they soon discovered that their well water was causing chemical-like burns on their skin. Their water had always contained some natural methane gas but now it was so saturated with it that it could be lit on fire. They took aquifer samples to independent water testing services and found the presence of both toluene and benzene, two highly toxic chemicals that are not found naturally.

Importantly, they also contacted the company Encana itself, Alberta Environment and the Alberta Research Council and all three determined that the effects the family observed were unrelated to the fracking activity. The family, as well as others nearby, and families on farms near Edmonton as well have had to either haul in water or abandon their farms because the aquifers their wells draw from are contaminated.

What can we do?

I have not found any Canadian documented harmful effects to people or farm animals that are directly tied to fracking activity. But I did find a transcript of an interesting interview conducted with Dr. Theo Colborn by an advocacy group in the U.S. called Democracy Now, which highlights some of the potential toxic effects of the chemicals used in fracking (http://7bends.com/2010/05/26/world-renowned-scientist-illuminates-health-effects-of-water-contamination-from-fracking/).

I am deeply concerned that the Alberta government is unwilling to test for possible effects on our water quality caused by the fracking wells that are now scattered all over our province and it is unwilling to inform Albertans of what it might already know. In the meantime we must ask ourselves if we are willing to wait until the health effects of some of these toxic chemicals becomes clear. When it does become clear, how difficult will it be to remove them from Alberta's water supply even after they have been banned from industrial use?

New York State has banned all fracking activity because legislators there are worried that the water supply of New York City could become irreversibly contaminated. Citizen's groups all over the U.S. as well as in British Columbia have spoken up and banned this activity near their homes.

I think we Albertans need to consider whether we are willing to risk our water supply for the sake of increased provincial gas revenue.

To help you make an informed decision for yourself I recommend two documentaries: Joel Fox’s documentary, Gasland, and Burning Water, a documentary produced for CBC's Passionate Eye series. If you simply enter "fracking" into Google, you will find a wealth of controversy over this industrial process.

Finally, if you are living near any fracking wells and you are concerned about your water quality please take a water sample and have it tested by an independent water-testing lab (University of Alberta or University of Calgary for example).

Write letters to the editor of your local newspaper. Talk to your neighbours. Write a blog.

*Has the fracked gas business bubble already burst? Check out this fascinating New York Times article published June 24, 2011.