The oilsands underlie approximately 140,000 square kilometers of Alberta, an area only slightly larger than England. Canada's oilsands are the third largest petroleum reserve in the world, smaller only to those of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.The large lakes are tailings pond filled with liquid residues from the Bitumen upgrading process. For every barrel of bitumen mined from the oilsands, 1.5 barrels of toxic tailing water is produced. The yellow mounts are Sulphur piles, another byproduct of the upgrading process.
"The beauty of the boreal forest that surrounds Fort McMurray and covers most of northern Alberta lies in its magnitude, but once you arrive at oil-sands central, what you see is a landscape erased, a terrain stretching in a radius of many hundreds of square kilometres that is not so much negatively impacted as forcibly stripped bare and excavated. Dominating this landscape are half a dozen giant extraction and refining plants with their stacks and smoke and fire, disorientingly wide and deep mines, and tailings ponds held in check by some of the world's largest dams. As a panoramic vision, it's all rather heartbreaking but, if one is forced to be honest, also awe-inspiring, such is the energy and the damage produced by human ambition".