title: American flamingo

text: Courtship is most often seen among individuals that change partners often or are promiscuous. A spectrum of pairing relationships is seen. Some birds have a long-term partner throughout the year; others form pairs during periods of courtship and nest attendance. How long a relationship lasts is affected by many factors, including addition and removal of adults, maturation of juveniles, and occurrence of trios and quartets. In most pairs, both individuals usually construct and defend the nest site. In rare cases, one individual undertakes both duties. Within trios, the dominant pair begins the nesting process by choosing and then defending the site.


title: American flamingo

text: For trios with one male and two females, the subordinate female is tolerated by the male, but often fights with the dominant female. If two females share a nest and both lay an egg, one female will try to destroy the other egg or roll it out of the nest. For trios with two males and one female, the subordinate male is tolerated by both individuals and often becomes the primary incubator and caregiver of the chicks. For quartets, the dominant male and two females take care of the nest, while the subordinate male remains around the periphery, never gaining access to the nest. Less animosity is observed between the dominant and subordinate females in quartets compared to trios.


title: American flamingo

text: The egg is attended constantly and equally by alternating parents. Chicks at the nest are attended constantly by alternating parents, up to 7–11 days of age. Most attentive periods during incubation and brooding last 21–60 hours, both in the case where the ‘off-duty’ parents remain in the same lagoon to feed, or (when breeding occurs in lagoons deficient in food), they fly to other lagoons to feed. Nest reliefs during incubation take place predominantly in late afternoon, or early morning.


title: American flamingo

text: The time for receiving food from parents decreases from hatching to about 105 days, and the decrease is greatest after the chicks have left the nest at 7–11 days to band into crèches. The frequency and the duration of feeds by male and female partners do not differ significantly. After chicks have left the nest, feeds are predominantly nocturnal.


title: American flamingo

text: The American flamingo has adapted to its shallow-water environment in several ways. It has evolved long legs and large webbed feet to wade and stir up the bottom of the water bed to bring up their food source to then be retrieved. To feed, it has evolved a specialized beak which is hooked downward and features marginal lamellae on the upper mandible, and inner and outer lamellae on both the upper and lower mandibles. These are adapted for filtering out differently sized food from water. Depending on the food source in their area, diets depend on the exact morphology of their beaks on what can and cannot be strained out of them. The American flamingos’ diet consists of small crustaceans, molluscs, some worms, nematodes, insects and their larvae, small fish, widgeon grass, seeds and algae. They are also known to consume mud from which they are able to get microorganisms and bacteria and obtain nutrients. It submerges its head under water to retrieve its food, and may have its head under water for long times, which requires it to hold its breath. Factors which affect the habitat choice of American flamingos are environmental temperatures, water depth, food source, accessibility of an area, and the presence of vegetation beds in feeding areas. If available food items do not meet the needs of the flamingos or the temperature is not appropriate to their requirements, they move to a better feeding or more temperate area.


title: American flamingo

text: The role of osmoregulation—the maintenance of a precise balance of solute and water concentrations within the body—is performed by a number of bodily functions working together. In "P. ruber", the kidney, the lower gastrointestinal tract, and the salt glands work together to maintain the homeostasis between ions and fluids. In mammals, the kidneys and urinary bladder are the primary organs used in osmoregulation. Birds, however, lack a urinary bladder and must compensate using these three organs.


title: American flamingo

text: American flamingos are saltwater birds that ingest food with a high salt content and mostly drink salt water (with an osmolarity of usually 1000), hyperosmotic to the bodies cells . Also, though not commonly, they can drink fresh water at near-boiling temperatures from geysers. From their high-salt diet, they would lose more water and have a greater salt uptake. One way in which they osmoregulate is through the use of a salt gland, which is found in their beaks. This salt gland helps excrete excess salt from the body through the nasal openings in the flamingo's beaks. When these birds consume salt, the osmolarity increases in the blood plasma through the gut. This causes water to move out of the cells, increasing extracellular fluids. Both these changes, in turn, activate the salt glands of the bird, but before any activity occurs in the salt glands, the kidney has to reabsorb the ingested sodium from the small intestine. As seen in other saltwater birds, the fluid that is excreted has been seen to have an osmolarity greater than that of the salt water, but this varies with salt consumption and body size.


title: American flamingo

text: As food and saltwater are ingested, sodium and water absorption begins through the walls of the gut and into the extracellular fluid. Sodium is then circulated to the kidney, where the plasma undergoes filtration by the renal glomerulus. Although birds' kidneys tend to be larger in size, they are inefficient in producing concentrated urine that is significantly hyperosmotic to their blood plasma. This form of secretion would cause dehydration from water loss. Therefore, sodium and water are reabsorbed into the plasma by renal tubules. This increase in osmotic plasma levels causes extracellular fluid volume to increase, which triggers receptors in both the brain and heart. These receptors then stimulate salt gland secretion and sodium is able to efficiently leave the body through the nares while maintaining a high body water level.


title: American flamingo

text: Flamingos, like many other marine birds, have a high saline intake, yet even the glomular filtration rate (GFR) remains unchanged. This is because of the salt glands; high concentrations of sodium are present in the renal filtrate, but can be reabsorbed almost completely where it is excreted in high concentrations in the salt glands. Renal reabsorption can be increased through the output of the antidiuretic hormone called arginine vasotocin (AVT). AVT opens protein channels in the collection ducts of the kidney called aquaporins. Aquaporins increase the membrane permeability to water, as well as causes less water to move from the blood and into the kidney tubules.


title: American flamingo

text: The salt gland used by the American flamingo has two segments, a medial and lateral segment. These segments are tube shaped glands that consist of two cell types. The first is the cuboidal – peripheral cells which are small, triangular shaped cells which have only a few mitochondria. The second specialized cells are the principal cells which are found down the length of the secretory tubules, and are rich in mitochondria. These cells are similar to the mitochondria rich cells found in teleost fish.


title: American flamingo

text: These cells within the salt gland employ several types of transport mechanisms that respond to osmoregulatory loads. Sodium-Potassium ATPase works with a Sodium-Chloride cotransporter (also known as the NKCC), and a basal potassium channel to secrete salt (NaCl) into secretory tubes. The ATPase uses energy from ATP to pump three sodium ions out of the cell and two potassium ions into the cell. The potassium channel allows potassium ions to diffuse out of the cell. The cotransporter pumps one sodium, potassium and two chloride ions into the cell. The chloride ion diffuses through the apical membrane into the secretory tube and the sodium follows via a paracellular route. This is what forms the hyperosmotic solution within the salt glands.


title: American flamingo

text: Although there has been little investigation on the specific circulatory and cardiovascular system of the phoenicopteridae, they possess the typical features of an avian circulatory system. As is seen in other aves, the flamingo's circulatory system is closed maintaining a separation of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. This maximizes their efficiency to meet their high metabolic needs during flight. Due to this need for increased cardiac output, the avian heart tends to be larger in relation to body mass than what is seen in most mammals.


title: American flamingo

text: The avian circulatory system is driven by a four-chambered, myogenic heart contained in a fibrous pericardial sac. This pericardial sac is filled with a serous fluid for lubrication. The heart itself is divided into a right and left half, each with an atrium and ventricle. The atrium and ventricles of each side are separated by atrioventricular valves which prevent back flow from one chamber to the next during contraction. Being myogenic, the hearts pace is maintained by pacemaker cells found in the sinoatrial node, located on the right atrium. The sinoatrial node uses calcium to cause a depolarizing signal transduction pathway from the atrium through right and left atrioventricular bundle which communicates contraction to the ventricles. The avian heart also consists of muscular arches that are made up of thick bundles of muscular layers. Much like a mammalian heart, the avian heart is composed of endocardial, myocardial and epicardial layers. The atrium walls tend to be thinner than the ventricle walls, due to the intense ventricular contraction used to pump oxygenated blood throughout the body.


title: American flamingo

text: Similar to the atrium, the arteries are composed of thick elastic muscles to withstand the pressure of the ventricular constriction, and become more rigid as they move away from the heart. Blood moves through the arteries, which undergo vasoconstriction, and into arterioles which act as a transportation system to distribute primarily oxygen as well as nutrients to all tissues of the body. As the arterioles move away from the heart and into individual organs and tissues they are further divided to increase surface area and slow blood flow. Travelling through the arterioles blood moves into the capillaries where gas exchange can occur. Capillaries are organized into capillary beds in tissues, it is here that blood exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide waste. In the capillary beds blood flow is slowed to allow maximum diffusion of oxygen into the tissues. Once the blood has become deoxygenated it travels through venules then veins and back to the heart. Veins, unlike arteries, are thin and rigid as they do not need to withstand extreme pressure. As blood travels through the venules to the veins a funneling occurs called vasodilation bringing blood back to the heart. Once the blood reaches the heart it moves first into the right atrium, then the left ventricle to be pumped through the lungs for further gas exchange of carbon dioxide waste for oxygen. Oxygenated blood then flows from the lungs through the left atrium to the left ventricle where it is pumped out to the body. With respect to thermoregulation, the American flamingo has highly vascularized feet that use a countercurrent exchange system in their legs and feet. This method of thermoregulation keeps a constant gradient between the veins and arteries that are in close proximity in order to maintain heat within the core and minimize heat loss or gain in the extremities. Heat loss is minimized while wading in cold water, while heat gain is minimized in the hot temperatures during rest and flight.


title: American flamingo

text: Avian hearts are generally larger than mammalian hearts when compared to body mass. This adaptation allows more blood to be pumped to meet the high metabolic need associated with flight. Birds, like the flamingo, have a very efficient system for diffusing oxygen into the blood; birds have a ten times greater surface area to gas exchange volume than mammals. As a result, birds have more blood in their capillaries per unit of volume of lung than a mammal. The American flamingo's four-chambered heart is myogenic, meaning that all the muscle cells and fibers have the ability to contract rhythmically. The rhythm of contraction is controlled by the pace maker cells which have a lower threshold for depolarization. The wave of electrical depolarization initiated here is what physically starts the heart's contractions and begins pumping blood. Pumping blood creates variations in blood pressure and as a result, creates different thicknesses of blood vessels. The Law of LaPlace can be used to explain why arteries are relatively thick and veins are thin.


title: American flamingo

text: It was widely thought that avian blood had special properties which attributed to a very efficient extraction and transportation of oxygen in comparison to mammalian blood. This is not true; there is no real difference in the efficiency of the blood, and both mammals and birds use a hemoglobin molecule as the primary oxygen carrier with little to no difference in oxygen carrying capacity. Captivity and age have been seen to have an effect on the blood composition of the American flamingo. A decrease in white blood cell numbers was predominate with age in both captive and free living flamingos, but captive flamingos showed a higher white blood cell count than free living flamingos. One exception occurs in free living flamingos with regards to white blood cell count. The number of eosinophils in free living birds are higher because these cells are the ones that fight off parasites with which a free living bird may have more contact than a captive one. Captive birds showed higher hematocrit and red blood cell numbers than the free living flamingos, and a blood hemoglobin increase was seen with age. An increase in hemoglobin would correspond with an adults increase in metabolic needs. A smaller mean cellular volume recorded in free living flamingos coupled with similar mean hemoglobin content between captive and free living flamingos could show different oxygen diffusion characteristics between these two groups. Plasma chemistry remains relatively stable with age but lower values of protein content, uric acid, cholesterol, triglycerides, and phospholipids were seen in free living flamingos. This trend can be attributed to shortages and variances in food intake in free living flamingos.


title: American flamingo

text: Avian erythrocytes (red blood cells) have been shown to contain approximately ten times the amount of taurine (an amino acid) as mammal erythrocytes. Taurine has a fairly large list of physiological functions; but in birds, it can have an important influence on osmoregulation. It helps the movement of ions in erythrocytes by altering the permeability of the membrane and regulating osmotic pressure within the cell. The regulation of osmotic pressure is achieved by the influx or efflux of taurine relative to changes in the osmolarity of the blood. In a hypotonic environment, cells will swell and eventually shrink; this shrinkage is due to efflux of taurine. This process also works in the opposite way in hypertonic environments. In hypertonic environments cells tend to shrink and then enlarge; this enlargement is due to an influx in taurine, effectively changing the osmotic pressure. This adaptation allows the flamingo to regulate between differences in salinity.


title: American flamingo

text: Relatively few studies have focused on the flamingo respiratory system, however little to no divergences from the standard avian anatomical design have occurred in their evolutionary history. Nevertheless, some physiological differences do occur in the flamingo and structurally similar species.


title: American flamingo

text: The respiratory system is not only important for efficient gas exchange, but for thermoregulation and vocalization. Thermoregulation is important for flamingos as they generally live in warm habitats and their plush plumage increases body temperature. Heat loss is accomplished through thermal polypnea (panting), that is an increase in respiratory rate. It has been seen that the medulla, hypothalamus and mid-brain are involved in the control of panting, as well through the Hering-Breuer reflex that uses stretch receptors in the lungs, and the vagus nerve. This effect of the panting is accelerated by a process called gular fluttering; rapid flapping of membranes in the throat which is synchronized with the movements of the thorax. Both of these mechanisms promote evaporative heat loss, which allows for the bird to push out warm air and water from the body. Increases in respiratory rate would normally cause respiratory alkalosis because carbon dioxide levels are rapidly dropping in the body, but the flamingo is able to bypass this, most likely through a shunt mechanism, which allow it to still maintain a sustainable partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the blood. Since the avian integument is not equipped with sweat glands, cutaneous cooling is minimal. Because the flamingo's respiratory system is shared with multiple functions, panting must be controlled to prevent hypoxia.


title: American flamingo

text: For a flamingo, having such a long neck means adapting to an unusually long trachea. Tracheas are an important area of the respiratory tract; aside from directing air in and out of the lungs, it has the largest volume of dead space in the tract. Dead space in avians is around 4.5 times higher in mammals of roughly the same size. In particular, flamingos have a trachea that is longer than its body length with 330 cartilaginous rings. As a result, they have a calculated dead space twice as high as another bird of the same size. To compensate for the elongation, they usually breathe in deep, slow patterns.


title: American flamingo

text: One hypothesis for the bird's adaptation to respiratory alkalosis is tracheal coiling. Tracheal coiling is an overly long extension of the trachea and can often wrap around the bird's body. When faced with a heat load, birds often use thermal panting and this adaptation of tracheal coiling allows ventilation of non-exchange surfaces which can enable the bird to avoid respiratory alkalosis. The flamingo uses a "flushout" pattern of ventilation where deeper breaths are essentially mixed in with shallow panting to flush out carbon dioxide and avoid alkalosis. The increased length of the trachea provides a greater ability for respiratory evaporation and cooling off without hyperventilation.


title: American flamingo

text: Thermoregulation is a matter of keeping a consistent body temperature regardless of the surrounding ambient temperature. Flamingos require both methods of efficient heat retention and release. Even though the American flamingo resides mainly close to the equator where there is relatively little fluctuation in temperature, seasonal and circadian variations in temperature must be accounted for.


title: American flamingo

text: Like all animals, flamingos maintain a relatively constant basal metabolic rate (BMR); the metabolic rate of an animal in its thermoneutral zone (TNZ) while at rest. The BMR is a static rate which changes depending on factors such as the time of day or seasonal activity. Like most other birds, basic physiological adaptations control both heat loss in warm conditions and heat retention in cooler conditions. Using a system of countercurrent blood flow, heat is efficiently recycled through the body rather than being lost through extremities such as the legs and feet.


title: American flamingo

text: Living in the equatorial region of the world, the American flamingo has little variation in seasonal temperature changes. However, as a homeothermic endotherm it is still faced with the challenge of maintaining a constant body temperature while being exposed to both the day (light period) and night (dark period) temperatures of its environments. "Phoenicopterus ruber" have evolved a number of thermoregulatory mechanisms to keep itself cool during the light period and warm during the dark period without expending too much energy. The American flamingo has been observed in a temperature niche between . In order to prevent water loss through evaporation when temperatures are elevated the flamingo will employ hyperthermia as a nonevaporative heat loss method keeping its body temperature between . This allows heat to leave the body by moving from an area of high body temperature to an area of a lower ambient temperature. Flamingos are also able to use evaporative heat loss methods such as, cutaneous evaporative heat loss and respiratory evaporative heat loss. During cutaneous heat loss, "Phoenicopterus ruber" relies on evaporation off of the skin to reduce its body temperature. This method is not very efficient as it requires evaporation to pass through the plumage. A more efficient way to reduce its body temperature is through respiratory evaporative heat loss, where the flamingo engages in panting to expel excessive body heat. During the dark period the flamingos tend to tuck their heads beneath their wing to conserve body heat. They may also elicit shivering as a means of muscular energy consumption to produce heat as needed.


title: American flamingo

text: One of the most distinctive attribute of "P. ruber" is its unipedal stance, or the tendency to stand on one leg. While the purpose of this iconic posture remains ultimately unanswered, strong evidence supports its function in regulating body temperature. Like most birds, the largest amount of heat is lost through the legs and feet; having long legs can be a major disadvantage when temperatures fall and heat retention is most important. By holding one leg up against the ventral surface of the body, the flamingo lowers the surface area by which heat exits the body. Moreover, it has been observed that during periods of increased temperatures such as mid-day, flamingos will stand on both legs. Holding a bipedal stance multiplies the amount of heat lost from the legs and further regulates body temperature.


title: American flamingo

text: Like other flamingo species, American flamingos will migrate short distances to ensure that they get enough food or because their current habitat has been disturbed in some way. One habitat disturbance that has been observed to cause flamingos to leave their feeding grounds is elevated water levels. These conditions make it difficult for "Phoenicopterus ruber" to wade, hindering their ability to access food. The flamingos will then abandon their feeding grounds in search of an alternate food source. While the flights are not as long as other migratory birds, flamingos still fly for periods without eating.


title: Folktronica

text: Folktronica is a genre of music comprising various elements of folk music and electronica, often featuring uses of acoustic instruments – especially stringed instruments – and incorporating hip hop, electronic or dance rhythms, although it varies based on influences and choice of sounds. "The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology" describes folktronica as "a catch-all [term] for all manner of artists who have combined mechanical dance beats with elements of acoustic rock or folk."<ref name="Scott/Ashgate"></ref>


title: Folktronica

text: The 1991 album "Every Man and Woman is a Star" by Ultramarine is credited as a progenitor of the genre; it featured a pastoral sound and incorporated traditional instruments such as violin and harmonica with techno and house elements. In the early 2000s, artists such as Four Tet, Isan, and Gravenhurst were lumped into a folktronica "scene" by the media and press. According to "The Sunday Times Culture's Encyclopedia of Modern Music", essential albums of the genre are Four Tet's "Pause" (2001), Tunng's "Mother's Daughter and Other Songs" (2005), and Caribou's "The Milk of Human Kindness" (2005).


title: Brand New Key

text: "Brand New Key" is a pop song written and sung by folk music singer Melanie. Initially a track of Melanie's album "Gather Me", produced by Melanie's husband Peter Schekeryk, it was known also as "The Rollerskate Song" due to its chorus. It was her greatest success, scoring No. 1 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 singles chart during December 1971 and January 1972. "Billboard" ranked it as the No. 9 song of 1972. It also scored No. 1 in Canada and Australia and No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart.


title: Brand New Key

text: The song is sung from the viewpoint of a girl with roller skates trying to attract the attention of a boy.


title: Brand New Key

text: In an interview with Examiner.com, Melanie described what she claimed was the inspiration for the song: "I was fasting with a 27-day fast on water. I broke the fast and went back to my life living in New Jersey and we were going to a flea market around six in the morning. On the way back… and I had just broken the fast, from the flea market, we passed a McDonald's and the aroma hit me, and I had been a vegetarian before the fast. So we pulled into the McDonald's and I got the whole works... the burger, the shake, and the fries… and no sooner after I finished that last bite of my burger… that song was in my head. The aroma brought back memories of roller skating and learning to ride a bike and the vision of my dad holding the back fender of the tire. And me saying to my dad... 'You’re holding, you’re holding, you’re holding, right?' Then I’d look back and he wasn’t holding and I’d fall. So that whole thing came back to me and came out in this song."


title: Brand New Key

text: The song has been described as folk music, pop music, and soft rock. It was arranged by Roger Kellaway.


title: Brand New Key

text: Melanie has acknowledged the possibility of detecting sexual innuendo in the lyrics, but has denied any deeper meaning:


title: Brand New Key

text: Theme song of the podcast “Wife of the Party” hosted by, popular comedian Bert Kreischer’s wife, LeeAnn Kreischer.


title: Brand New Key

text: Melanie's version is heard in the 1997 film "Boogie Nights" as Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) has his "audition" with Rollergirl (Heather Graham) in front of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds).


title: Brand New Key

text: The song is also played in "Jackass 3-D" during the "Bungee Boogie" stunt skit (in which the cast members use bungee cords, skateboards and a ramp to slingshot into a kiddie pool).


title: Brand New Key

text: In the 9th season episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000", "Werewolf", Mike sings part of the song's chorus in a medley set to the film's end credits.


title: Brand New Key

text: The original version appears in season one of the FX show "The Bridge", as the character Daniel Frye flushes his supply of drugs and alcohol.


title: Brand New Key

text: The original version also appears in the 2016 Hallmark TV movie "Signed sealed delivered from the heart".


title: Brand New Key

text: On April 4, 2016, Jimmy Fallon lip synced the song during a "Lip Sync Battle" on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon", while he competed with actress Melissa McCarthy.


title: Brand New Key

text: During the 16th season of "American Idol", contestant Maddie Poppe performed the song during the Top 24 elimination round.


title: Brand New Key

text: The original version appears in episode 1 of the first season of the 2017 Australian television series "Sisters", as the viewer is initially introduced to Julia, one of the main characters.


title: Brand New Key

text: Melanie's version is heard playing over the closing credits of the 2nd episode of the 2020 miniseries "The Stand", right after Randall Flagg gives Lloyd Henreid a stone that transforms into a key, and frees him from prison. It is also heard in the 2021 "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" episode, "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink", when Frank drops Dennis and Dee off at South Philly Skate in 1998.


title: Brand New Key

text: The song is played during the "Apocalypse DJ" running sketch portion of the third episode of the 2022 "The Kids in the Hall" revival series. The sketches depict a radio DJ (played by Dave Foley) playing the song over and over again in the aftermath of an apocalypse caused by a "DNA Bomb".


title: Brand New Key

text: On the October 17, 2016, episode of singing competition television show "The Voice", Team Miley (Cyrus) contestants Darby Walker and Karlee Metzger performed the song in a Battle round.


title: Brand New Key

text: In the first online episode of the Comeback Stage of the singing competition television show "The Voice", no-chair reject Klea Olson performed the song as part of a Battle round against fellow Team Bebe (Rexha) members Nathan and Chesi Arnett, who performed the song "Tulsa Time."


title: Kora (instrument)

text: The kora (Manding languages: "köra") is a stringed instrument used extensively in West Africa. A kora typically has 21 strings, which are played by plucking with the fingers. It combines features of the lute and harp.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: The kora is built from gourd, cut in half and covered with cow skin to make a resonator with a long hardwood neck. The skin is supported by two handles that run underneath it. It has 21 strings, each of which plays a different note. These strings are supported by a notched, double free-standing bridge. The kora doesn't fit into any one category of musical instrument, but rather several, and must be classified as a "double-bridge-harp-lute." The strings run in two divided ranks, characteristic of a double harp. They do not end in a soundboard but are instead held in notches on a bridge, classifying it as a bridge harp. The strings originate from a string arm or neck and cross a bridge directly supported by a resonating chamber, also making it a lute.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: The sound of a kora resembles that of a harp, though when played in the traditional style it bears resemblance to a guitar played using the flamenco or Delta blues technique of plucking polyrhythmic patterns with both hands (using the remaining fingers to secure the instrument by holding the hand posts on either side of the strings). Ostinato riffs ("Kumbengo") and improvised solo runs ("Birimintingo") are played at the same time by skilled players.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: Kora players have traditionally come from jali families (also from the Mandinka tribes) who are traditional historians, genealogists and storytellers who pass their skills on to their descendants. Though played in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, the instrument was first discovered in the Gambia. While those from neighbouring Guinea were known to carry the lute, Senegalese Griots were known as carriers of a hand drum known as the Sabar. Most West African musicians prefer the term "jali" to "griot," which is the French word. "Jali" means something similar to a "bard" or oral historian.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: Traditional koras feature strings, eleven played by the left hand and ten by the right. Modern koras made in the Casamance region of southern Senegal sometimes feature additional bass strings, adding up to four strings to the traditional 21. Strings were traditionally made from thin strips of hide, such as cow or antelope skin. Today, most strings are made from harp strings or nylon fishing line, sometimes plaited together to create thicker strings.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: A vital accessory in the past was the nyenmyemo, a leaf-shaped plate of tin or brass with wire loops threaded around the edge. Clamped to the bridge, or the top end of the neck it produced sympathetic sounds, serving as an amplifier since the sound carried well into the open air. In today's environment, players usually prefer or need an electronic pickup.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: By moving the konso (a system of leather tuning rings) up and down the neck, a kora player can retune the instrument into one of four seven-note scales. These scales are close in tuning to western major, minor and Lydian modes.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: In the 1300s, the traveller Ibn Battuta mentioned that the women who accompanied Dugha to perform were carrying bows that they plucked. He did not mention the number of strings, but this clearly shows the existence of harp instruments in 14th century Mali and could be the earliest written reference to the kora. The kora is designed like a bow with a gourd, similarly to Ibn Battuta's description, but Battuta did not go into enough detail about the instruments for them to be identifiable. The earliest European reference to the kora in Western literature is in "Travels in Interior Districts of Africa" (1799) by the Scotsman


title: Kora (instrument)

text: Mungo Park. The most likely scenario, based on Mandinka oral tradition, suggests that the origins of the kora may ultimately be linked with Jali Mady Fouling Cissoko, some time after the founding of Kaabu in the 16th century.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: The kora is mentioned in the Senegalese national anthem "Pincez Tous vos Koras, Frappez les Balafons."


title: Kora (instrument)

text: Nowadays, koras are increasingly made with guitar machine heads instead of the traditional konso (leather rings). The advantage is that they are much easier to tune. The disadvantage is that this design limits the tuning range of the instrument because string lengths are more fixed and lighter strings are needed to lift it much more than a tone. Learning to tune a traditional kora is arguably as difficult as learning to play it, and many tourists who are entranced by the sound while in West Africa buy koras and then find themselves unable to keep it in tune once they are home, relegating it to the status of ornament. Koras can be converted to replace the leather rings with machine heads. Wooden pegs and harp pegs are also used, but both can still cause tuning problems in damper climates unless made with great skill.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: In the late 20th century, a 25-string model of the kora was developed, though it has been adopted by only a few players, primarily in the region of Casamance, in southern Senegal. Some kora players such as Seckou Keita have double necked koras, allowing them to switch from one tuning to another within seconds, giving them increased flexibility.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: The French Benedictine monks of the Keur Moussa Abbey in Senegal (who possibly were the first to introduce guitar machine heads instead of leather rings in the late seventies) conceived a method based on scores to teach the instrument. Brother Dominique Catta, choirmaster of the Keur Moussa Abbey, was the first Western composer who wrote for the kora (solo pieces as well as duets with Western instruments).


title: Kora (instrument)

text: An electric instrument modeled on the kora (but made primarily of metal) called the gravikord was invented in the late 20th century by instrument builder and musician Robert Grawi. It has 24 strings and is tuned and played differently than the kora. Another instrument, the gravi-kora, a 22-stringed electro-acoustic instrument, was later developed by Robert Grawi especially for kora players who wanted a modern instrument. Its playing and tuning are the same as the traditional kora. The gravi-kora has been adopted by kora players such as Daniel Berkman, Jacques Burtin, and Foday Musa Suso, who featured it in recordings with jazz innovator Herbie Hancock, with his band "Mandingo", and on Suso's "New World Power" album.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: As part of the oral tradition of West Africa, music for the kora was not written until the 20th century. Ethnomusicologists were the only ones to record some traditional airs in the normal grand staff method, using the G clef and the F clef.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: Today, kora scores are written on a single G clef, following the Keur Moussa notation system. This notation system was created for the kora in the late 1970s by Brother Dominique Catta, a monk of the Keur Moussa Monastery (Senegal). The seven low notes that should be written on the F clef are replaced by Arabic or Roman numerals and written on the G clef.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: While jali still compose in the traditional way (without writing scores), some Western musicians began to write partitures for the kora and adopted the Keur Moussa notation system at the beginning of the 1980s. More than 200 scores have already been written for kora solo or kora and Western instruments. Two notable Western composers for the kora are Brother Dominique Catta and Jacques Burtin (France), who wrote most of these scores, though composers like Carole Ouellet (Canada), Brother Grégoire Philippe (Monastère de Keur Moussa) and Sister Claire Marie Ledoux (France) have also contributed with their own original works.


title: Kora (instrument)

text: Derek Gripper (Cape Town, South Africa) has transcribed a number of West African kora compositions by Toumani Diabaté and others for performance on western-style classical guitar, and has performed some of these transcriptions on two recordings and in concert from 2012 through 2017.


title: Christian Kirk

text: Christian Davon Kirk (born November 18, 1996) is an American football wide receiver for the Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at Texas A&M, and was selected by the Arizona Cardinals in the second round of the 2018 NFL Draft.


title: Christian Kirk

text: Kirk attended Saguaro High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he played high school football. He played both wide receiver and running back for the Sabercats. He gained over 3,000 all-purpose yards as a senior and 2,000 as a junior. Kirk was rated by Rivals.com as a five-star recruit and was ranked among the top overall prospects in his class. He committed to Texas A&M University to play college football.


title: Christian Kirk

text: Kirk attended and played college football at Texas A&M under head coach Kevin Sumlin. Kirk earned a starting job at receiver as a true freshman in 2015. In his first game, he had 6 receptions for 106 yards with a touchdown and also returned a punt 79 yards for a touchdown. As a freshman in 2015, Kirk played 13 games with 1,009 receiving yards and seven touchdowns. He also had two return touchdowns on 14 punt returns for 341 yards and 20 kickoff returns for 385 yards. As a sophomore in 2016, Kirk played 13 games with 928 receiving yards and nine touchdowns. He also had three return touchdowns on 13 punt returns for 282 yards and 6 kickoff returns for 173 yards. In 2017, as a junior, he played in 13 games, catching 71 passes for 919 yards and 10 touchdowns, along with one touchdown on 10 punt returns for 191 yards and one touchdown on 22 returns for 490 yards. After the season, Kirk declared for the 2018 NFL Draft.


title: Christian Kirk

text: Kirk was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals in the second round (47th overall) of the 2018 NFL Draft. He was the fifth wide receiver to be selected that year.


title: Christian Kirk

text: In the Cardinals' season-opening loss to the Washington Redskins, Kirk had a four-yard reception to go along with two punt returns for 44 net yards in his NFL debut. In Week 3, he recorded a solid game with seven receptions for 90 yards in the 16–14 loss to the Chicago Bears. In Week 5 against the San Francisco 49ers, he caught a 75-yard touchdown bomb from fellow rookie Josh Rosen to help the Cardinals earn their first win of the season by a score of 28–18. He played in 12 games, starting seven, recording 43 receptions for 590 yards and three touchdowns. He suffered a broken foot in Week 13 and was placed on injured reserve on December 3, 2018.


title: Christian Kirk

text: In Week 2 against the Baltimore Ravens, Kirk caught six passes for 114 yards as the Cardinals lost 23–17. In Week 10 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Kirk caught 6 passes for 138 yards and three touchdowns in the 30–27 loss. Overall, Kirk finished the 2019 season with 68 receptions for 709 receiving yards and three receiving touchdowns.


title: Christian Kirk

text: In Week 6 against the Dallas Cowboys on "Monday Night Football", Kirk had two receptions for 86 receiving yards and two receiving touchdowns in the 38–10 victory. In the following game, a 37–34 overtime victory over the Seattle Seahawks on "NBC Sunday Night Football", he again recorded two receiving touchdowns. In a Week 9 loss to the Miami Dolphins, he had five receptions for 123 receiving yards and one receiving touchdown. He was placed on the reserve/COVID-19 list by the Cardinals on January 2, 2021, and activated on January 13.


title: Christian Kirk

text: Overall, in the 2020 season, Kirk finished with 48 receptions for 621 receiving yards and six receiving touchdowns in 14 games.


title: Christian Kirk

text: Kirk entered the 2021 season third on the Cardinals wide receiver depth chart. He finished the season as the Cardinals leading receiver with a career-high 77 catches for 982 yards and five touchdowns.


title: Christian Kirk

text: On March 16, 2022, Kirk signed a four-year, $72 million contract with the Jacksonville Jaguars. In his Jaguars debut, Kirk had six receptions for 117 yards in the 28–22 loss to the Washington Commanders. In the following game, he recorded two receiving touchdowns in the 24–0 victory over the Indianapolis Colts. In Week 10, against the Kansas City Chiefs, he had nine receptions for 105 yards and two touchdowns in the 27–17 loss.


title: Christian Kirk

text: On May 14, 2018, it was revealed that Kirk was arrested for disorderly conduct and causing property damage in Scottsdale, Arizona, which occurred on February 3, more than two months prior to the draft. Kirk allegedly threw rocks at cars while attending the Waste Management Phoenix Open at TPC Scottsdale. Kirk was deemed to be intoxicated during the incident. On May 29, 2018, all charges against Kirk were dropped.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The Ordnungspolizei (), abbreviated Orpo, meaning "Order Police", were the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany from 1936 to 1945. The Orpo organisation was absorbed into the Nazi monopoly on power after regional police jurisdiction was removed in favour of the central Nazi government ("Reich-ification", "Verreichlichung", of the police). The Orpo was controlled nominally by the Interior Ministry, but its executive functions rested with the leadership of the "SS" until the end of World War II. Owing to their green uniforms, Orpo were also referred to as Grüne Polizei (green police). The force was first established as a centralised organisation uniting the municipal, city, and rural uniformed police that had been organised on a state-by-state basis.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The "Ordnungspolizei" encompassed virtually all of Nazi Germany's law-enforcement and emergency response organisations, including fire brigades, coast guard, and civil defence. In the prewar period, Heinrich Himmler, head of the "SS", and Kurt Daluege, chief of the Order Police, cooperated in transforming the police force of the Weimar Republic into militarised formations ready to serve the regime's aims of conquest and racial annihilation. Police troops were first formed into battalion-sized formations for the invasion of Poland, where they were deployed for security and policing purposes, also taking part in executions and mass deportations. During World War II, the force had the task of policing the civilian population of the occupied and colonised countries beginning in spring 1940. Orpo's activities escalated to genocide with the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. Twenty-three Order Police battalions, formed into independent regiments or attached to "Wehrmacht" security divisions and "Einsatzgruppen", perpetrated mass-murder in the Holocaust and were responsible for widespread crimes against humanity and genocide targeting the civilian population.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: Heinrich Himmler, head of the "SS", was named Chief of German Police in the Interior Ministry on 17 June 1936 after Hitler announced a decree which was to "unify the control of police duties in the Reich". Traditionally, law enforcement in Germany had been a state and local matter. In this role, Himmler was nominally subordinate to Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. However, the decree effectively subordinated the police to the "SS". Himmler gained authority as all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies were amalgamated into the new "Ordnungspolizei", whose main office became populated by officers of the "SS".


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The police were divided into the "Ordnungspolizei" (Orpo or regular police) and the "Sicherheitspolizei" ("SiPo" or security police), which had been established in June 1936. The Orpo assumed duties of regular uniformed law enforcement while the SiPo consisted of the secret state police ("Geheime Staatspolizei" or Gestapo) and criminal investigation police ("Kriminalpolizei" or Kripo). The "Kriminalpolizei" was a corps of professional detectives involved in fighting crime and the task of the Gestapo was combating espionage and political dissent. On 27 September 1939, the "SS" security service, the "Sicherheitsdienst" (SD) and the "SiPo" were folded into the Reich Security Main Office ("Reichssicherheitshauptamt" or RSHA). The RSHA symbolised the close connection between the "SS" (a party organisation) and the police (a state organisation).


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: In broad terms, Himmler pursued the amalgamation of "SS" and police into a form of "State Protection Corps" ("Staatsschutzkorps"), and used the expanded reach the police powers gave him to persecute ideological opponents and "undesirables" of the Nazi regime such as Jews, freemasons, the churches, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other groups defined as "asocial". The Nazi conception of criminality was racial and biological, holding that criminal traits were hereditary, and had to be exterminated to purify German blood. As a result, even ordinary criminals were consigned to concentration camps to remove them from the German racial community ("Volksgemeinschaft") and ultimately exterminate them.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The Order Police played a central role in carrying out the Holocaust. By "both career professionals and reservists, in both battalion formations and precinct service" ("Einzeldienst") through providing men for the tasks involved.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The German Order Police had grown to 244,500 men by mid-1940. The Orpo was under the overall control of "Reichsführer-SS" Himmler as Chief of the German Police in the Ministry of the Interior. It was initially commanded by "SS-Oberstgruppenführer und Generaloberst der Polizei" Kurt Daluege. In May 1943, Daluege had a massive heart attack and was removed from duty. He was replaced by "SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS und der Polizei" Alfred Wünnenberg, who served until the end of the war. By 1941, the Orpo had been divided into the following offices covering every aspect of German law enforcement.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The central command office known as the "Ordnungspolizei Hauptamt" was located in Berlin. From 1943 it was considered a full "SS"-Headquarters command. The Orpo main office consisted of Command Department ("Kommandoamt"), responsible for finance, personnel and medical; Administrative ("Verwaltung") charged with pay, pensions and permits; Economic ("Wirtschaftsverwaltungsamt"); Technical Emergency Service ("Technische Nothilfe"); Fire Brigades Bureau ("Feuerwehren"); Colonial Police ("Kolonialpolizei"); and SS and Police Technical Training Academy ("Technische SS-und Polizeiakademie").


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: "Sonderpolizei" was the special police authorities not subordinate to the Hauptamt Ordnungspolizei or the Reichssicherheitshauptamt:


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: Between 1939 and 1945, the "Ordnungspolizei" maintained military formations, trained and outfitted by the main police offices within Germany. Specific duties varied widely from unit to unit and from one year to another. Generally, the Order Police were not directly involved in frontline combat, except for Ardennes in May 1940, and the Siege of Leningrad in 1941. The first 17 battalion formations (from 1943 renamed "SS-Polizei-Bataillone") were deployed by Orpo in September 1939 along with the Wehrmacht army in the invasion of Poland. The battalions guarded Polish prisoners of war behind the German lines, and carried out expulsion of Poles from "Reichsgaue" under the banner of "Lebensraum". They also committed atrocities against both the Catholic and the Jewish populations as part of those "resettlement actions". After hostilities had ceased, the battalionssuch as Reserve Police Battalion 101took up the role of security forces, patrolling the perimeters of the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland (the internal ghetto security issues were managed by the "SS", "SD", and the Criminal Police, in conjunction with the Jewish ghetto administration).


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: Each battalion consisted of approximately 500 men armed with light infantry weapons. In the east, each company also had a heavy machine-gun detachment. Administratively, the Police Battalions remained under the Chief of Police Kurt Daluege, but operationally they were under the authority of regional SS and Police Leaders ("SS- und Polizeiführer"), who reported up a separate chain of command directly to "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler. The battalions were used for various auxiliary duties, including the so-called anti-partisan operations, support of combat troops, and construction of defence works (i.e. Atlantic Wall). Some of them were focused on traditional security roles as an occupying force, while others were directly involved in actions designed to inflict terror and in the ensuing Holocaust. While they were similar to "Waffen-SS", they were not part of the thirty-eight "Waffen-SS" divisions, and should not be confused with them, including the national 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division. The battalions were originally numbered in series from 1 to 325, but in February 1943 were renamed and renumbered from 1 to about 37, to distinguish them from the "Schutzmannschaft" auxiliary battalions recruited from local population in German-occupied areas.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The Order Police battalions, operating both independently and in conjunction with the "Einsatzgruppen", became an integral part of the Final Solution in the two years following the attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Operation Barbarossa. The first mass-murder of 3,000 Jews by Police Battalion 309 occurred in occupied Białystok on 12 July 1941. Police battalions were part of the first and second wave of murders in 1941–42 in the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union and also during the killing operations within the 1939 borders of the USSR, whether as part of Order Police regiments, or as separate units reporting directly to the local "SS" and Police Leaders. They included the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg, Battalion 133 of the Nürnberg Order Police, Police Battalions 45, 309 from Koln, and 316 from Bottrop-Oberhausen. Their murder operations bore the brunt of the "Holocaust by bullet" on the Eastern Front. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, this latter role was obscured both by the lack of court evidence and by deliberate obfuscation, while most of the focus was on the better-known "Einsatzgruppen" ("Operational groups") who reported to the "Reichssicherheitshauptamt" (RSHA) under Reinhard Heydrich.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: Order Police battalions involved in direct killing operations were responsible for at least 1 million murders. Starting in 1941 the Battalions and local Order Police units helped to transport Jews from the ghettos in both Poland and the USSR (and elsewhere in occupied Europe) to the concentration and extermination camps, as well as operations to hunt down and murder Jews outside the ghettos. The Order Police were one of the two primary sources from which the "Einsatzgruppen" drew personnel in accordance with manpower needs (the other being the "Waffen-SS").


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: In 1942, the majority of the police battalions were re-consolidated into thirty SS and Police Regiments. These formations were intended for garrison security duty, anti-partisan functions, and to support "Waffen-SS" units on the Eastern Front. Notably, the regular military police of the "Wehrmacht" "(Feldgendarmerie") were separate from the "Ordnungspolizei".


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The primary combat arm of the "Ordnungspolizei" was the "SS Polizei" Division of the "Waffen-SS". The division was formed in October 1939, when thousands of members of the Orpo were drafted and placed together with artillery and signals units transferred from the army. The division consisted of four police regiments composed of Orpo personnel and was typically used to rotate police members into a military situation, so as not to lose police personnel to the general draft of the "Wehrmacht" or to the full "SS" divisions of the regular "Waffen-SS". Very late in the war several Orpo "SS"-Police regiments were transferred to the "Waffen-SS" to form the 35th "SS"-Police Grenadier Division. Cossack Orpo units were rolled into the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps with other units to nominally form 2nd Cossack Division.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: By the start of the Second World War in 1939, the "SS" had effectively gained complete operational control over the German Police, although outwardly the "SS" and Police still functioned as separate entities. The "Ordnungspolizei" maintained its own system of insignia and Orpo ranks as well as distinctive police uniforms. Under an "SS" directive known as the "Rank Parity Decree", policemen were highly encouraged to join the "SS" and, for those who did so, a special police insignia known as the "SS" Membership Runes for Order Police was worn on the breast pocket of the police uniform.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: In 1940, standard practice in the German Police was to grant equivalent "SS" rank to all police generals. Police generals who were members of the "SS" were referred to simultaneously by both rank titlesfor instance, a "Generalleutnant" in the Police who was also an SS member would be referred to as "SS Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Polizei". In 1942, "SS" membership became mandatory for police generals, with "SS" collar insignia (overlaid on police green backing) worn by all police officers ranked "Generalmajor" and above.


title: Ordnungspolizei

text: The distinction between the police and the "SS" had virtually disappeared by 1943 with the creation of the "SS" and Police Regiments, which were consolidated from earlier police security battalions. "SS" officers now routinely commanded police troops and police generals serving in command of military troops were granted equivalent "SS" rank in the "Waffen-SS". In August 1944, when Himmler was appointed "Chef des Ersatzheeres" (Chief of the Home Army), all police generals automatically were granted "Waffen-SS" rank because they had authority over the prisoner-of-war camps.


title: Mods and rockers

text: Mods and rockers were two conflicting British youth subcultures of the 1950s and 1960s. Media coverage of mods and rockers fighting in 1964 sparked a moral panic about British youth, and the two groups became widely perceived as violent, unruly troublemakers.


title: Mods and rockers

text: The rocker subculture was centred on motorcycling. Rockers generally wore protective clothing such as black leather jackets and motorcycle boots or brothel creeper. The style was influenced by Marlon Brando in the 1953 film "The Wild One". The common rocker hairstyle was a pompadour, while their music genre of choice was 1950s rock and roll and R&B, played by artists including Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and Bo Diddley, as well as British rock and roll musicians such as Billy Fury and Johnny Kidd.


title: Mods and rockers

text: The mod subculture was centred on fashion and music, and many mods rode scooters. Mods wore suits and other cleancut outfits, and listened to music genres such as modern jazz, soul, Motown, ska and British blues-rooted bands like the Yardbirds, the Small Faces, and the Who. The Who wrote a portrait of the cultures with their 1973 album "Quadrophenia".


title: Mods and rockers

text: BBC News stories from May 1964 stated that mods and rockers were jailed after riots in seaside resort towns in Southern England, such as Margate in Kent, Brighton in Sussex, and Clacton in Essex.


title: Mods and rockers

text: Conflicts took place at Clacton and Hastings during the Easter weekend of 1964. A second round took place on the south coast of England over the Whitsun weekend (18 and 19 May 1964), especially at Brighton, where fights occurred over two days and moved along the coast to Hastings and back; hence the "Second Battle of Hastings" tag. A small number of rockers were isolated on Brighton beach where they – despite being protected by police – were overwhelmed and assaulted by mods. Eventually calm was restored and a judge levied heavy fines, describing those arrested as "sawdust Caesars."


title: Mods and rockers

text: Newspapers described the mod and rocker clashes as being of "disastrous proportions", and labelled mods and rockers as "vermin" and "louts". Newspaper editorials fanned the flames of hysteria, such as a "Birmingham Post" editorial in May 1964, which warned that mods and rockers were "internal enemies" in the UK who would "bring about disintegration of a nation's character". The magazine "Police Review" argued that the mods and rockers' purported lack of respect for law and order could cause violence to "surge and flame like a forest fire".


title: Mods and rockers

text: As a result of this media coverage, two British Members of Parliament travelled to the seaside areas to survey the damage, and MP Harold Gurden called for a resolution for intensified measures to control hooliganism. One of the prosecutors in the trial of some of the Clacton brawlers argued that mods and rockers were youths with no serious views, who lacked respect for law and order.


title: Mods and rockers

text: There were occasional incidents thereafter. The punk band The Exploited recorded the song "Fuck the Mods" on the B-side of their first release and the record's back cover stated "To all the Edinburgh punks and skins – keep on mod-bashing!!" The band performed in Finsbury Park, London in 1981 on the same night that The Jam were playing nearby, and there was fighting after the gigs between the mods who had watched The Jam and the rockers who had watched The Exploited.


title: Mods and rockers

text: The sociologist Stanley Cohen was led by his retrospective study of the mods and rockers conflict to develop the term "moral panic". In his 1972 study "Folk Devils and Moral Panics", he examined media coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s. He concedes that mods and rockers had some fights in the mid-1960s, but argues that they were no different from the evening brawls that occurred between youths throughout the 1950s and early 1960s at seaside resorts and after football games. He argues that the UK media turned the mod subculture into a symbol of delinquent and deviant status.


title: Mods and rockers

text: Cohen argues that as media hysteria about knife-wielding mods increased, the image of a fur-collared anorak and scooter would "stimulate hostile and punitive reactions". He says the media used possibly faked interviews with supposed rockers such as "Mick the Wild One". The media also tried to exploit accidents that were unrelated to mod-rocker violence, such as an accidental drowning of a youth, which resulted in the headline "Mod Dead in Sea".


title: Mods and rockers

text: Eventually, when the media ran out of real fights to report, they would publish deceptive headlines, such as using a subheading "Violence", even when the article reported that there was no violence at all. Newspaper writers also began to associate mods and rockers with various social issues, such as teen pregnancy, contraceptives, amphetamines, and violence.


title: Mods and rockers

text: The 2010 remake of the 1948 film "Brighton Rock" is set in the era of mods and rockers, with Bank Holiday tribal clashes on Brighton promenades and beaches.


title: Mods and rockers

text: The 1979 film "Quadrophenia" starring Phil Daniels and Leslie Ash is also set against the background of the 1964 Brighton clash with the incident featuring prominently.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Athabasca oil sands, also known as the Athabasca tar sands, are large deposits of bitumen or extremely heavy crude oil (viscosity of 5,000-10,000 centipoises) that constitute unconventional resources, located in northeastern Alberta, Canada – roughly centred on the boomtown of Fort McMurray. These oil sands, hosted primarily in the McMurray Formation, consist of a mixture of crude bitumen (a semi-solid rock-like form of crude oil), silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The Athabasca deposit is the largest known reservoir of crude bitumen in the world and the largest of three major oil sands deposits in Alberta, along with the nearby Peace River and Cold Lake deposits (the latter stretching into Saskatchewan).


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Together, these oil sand deposits lie under of boreal forest and muskeg (peat bogs) and contain about of bitumen in-place, comparable in magnitude to the world's total proven reserves of conventional petroleum. The International Energy Agency (IEA) lists the economically recoverable reserves, at 2007 prices and modern unconventional oil production technology, to be , or about 10% of these deposits. These contribute to Canada's total proven reserves being the third largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela's Orinoco Belt.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: By 2009, the two extraction methods used were "in situ" extraction, when the bitumen occurs deeper within the ground, (which will account for 80 percent of oil sands development) and surface or open-pit mining, when the bitumen is closer to the surface. Only 20 percent of bitumen can be extracted using open pit mining methods, which involves large scale excavation of the land with huge hydraulic power shovels and 400-ton heavy hauler trucks. Surface mining leaves toxic tailings ponds. In contrast, "in situ" uses more specialized techniques such as steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). "Eighty percent of the oil sands will be developed "in situ" which accounts for 97.5 percent of the total surface area of the oil sands region in Alberta." In 2006 the Athabasca deposit was the only large oil sands reservoir in the world which was suitable for large-scale surface mining, although most of this reservoir can only be produced using more recently developed in-situ technology.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Athabasca oil sands are named after the Athabasca River which cuts through the heart of the deposit, and traces of the heavy oil are readily observed on the river banks. Historically, the bitumen was used by the indigenous Cree and Dene Aboriginal peoples to waterproof their canoes. The oil deposits are located within the boundaries of Treaty 8, and several First Nations of the area are involved with the sands.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Athabasca oil sands first came to the attention of European fur traders in 1719 when Wa-pa-su, a Cree trader, brought a sample of bituminous sands to the Hudson's Bay Company post at York Factory on Hudson Bay where Henry Kelsey was the manager. In 1778, Peter Pond, another fur trader and a founder of the rival North West Company, became the first European to see the Athabasca deposits after exploring the Methye Portage which allowed access to the rich fur resources of the Athabasca River system from the Hudson Bay watershed.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In 1788, fur trader Alexander Mackenzie, after whom the Mackenzie River was later named, traveled along routes to both the Arctic and Pacific Ocean wrote: "At about from the fork (of the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers) are some bituminous fountains into which a pole of long may be inserted without the least resistance. The bitumen is in a fluid state and when mixed with gum, the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir, it serves to gum the Indians' canoes." He was followed in 1799 by mapmaker David Thompson and in 1819 by British Naval officer John Franklin.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: John Richardson did the first serious scientific assessment of the oil sands in 1848 on his way north to search for Franklin's lost expedition. The first government-sponsored survey of the oil sands was initiated in 1875 by John Macoun, and in 1883, G. C. Hoffman of the Geological Survey of Canada tried separating the bitumen from oil sand with the use of water and reported that it separated readily. In 1888, Robert Bell, the director of the Geological Survey of Canada, reported to a Senate Committee that "The evidence ... points to the existence in the Athabasca and Mackenzie valleys of the most extensive petroleum field in America, if not the world."


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Count Alfred von Hammerstein (1870–1941), who arrived in the region in 1897, promoted the Athabasca oil sands for over forty years, taking photos with descriptive titles such as "Tar Sands and Flowing Asphaltum in the Athabasca District," that are now in the National Library and National Archives Canada. Photos of the Athabasca oil sands were also featured in Canadian writer and adventurer, Agnes Deans Cameron's, best-selling book entitled "The New North: Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic" which recounted her roundtrip to the Arctic Ocean. Following this journey and the publication of her book, she travelled extensively as lecturer, with magic lantern slides of her Kodak images, promoting immigration to western Canada at Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrew's University and the Royal Geographical Society. Her photographs were reproduced in 2011–2012 in an exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Cameron was particularly enthusiastic about the Athabaska region and the Athabaska oil sands which included photos of Count Alfred Von Hammerstein's oil drill works along the Athabasca River. "While the Count was unsuccessful drilling for "elephant pools of oil," Cameron's book and its images... made her a media celebrity." "In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank, out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. ... Tar there is ... in plenty. ... It oozes from every fissure, and into some bituminous tar well we can poke a twenty-foot pole and find no resistance.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In 1926, Karl Clark of the University of Alberta received a patent for a hot water separation process which was the forerunner of today's thermal extraction processes. Several attempts to implement it had varying degrees of success.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: A pioneer in the discovery and use of natural gas was Georg Naumann. He used natural gas as early as about 1940.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Project Oilsand, also known as Project Oilsands, was a 1958 proposal to exploit the Athabasca oil sands using the underground detonation of nuclear explosives; hypothetically, the heat and pressure created by an underground detonation would boil the bitumen deposits, reducing their viscosity to the point that standard oilfield techniques could be used. The general means by which the plan was to work was discussed in the October 1976 "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" issue. A patent was granted for the process that was intended: "The Process for Stimulating Petroliferous Subterranean Formations with Contained Nuclear Explosions" by Bray, Knutson, and Coffer, which was first submitted in 1964. With the nuclear heating option considered a forerunner to some of the nascent conventional heating ideas that are presently suggested and in use extracting oil from the Alberta regions Athabasca oil sands.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The proposal, originally known as "Project Cauldron", was devised by geologist Manley L. Natland at Los Angeles-based Richfield Oil Corporation. Natland believed that an underground blast was the most efficient way to generate the heat needed to liquefy the viscous bitumen so that it could be pumped to the surface by conventional wells. The project was conceived of as part of Operation Plowshare, a United States project to harness the nuclear explosions for peaceful applications. However, some experts had doubts. In 1959, oil sands pioneer Robert Fitzsimmons of the International Bitumen Company wrote a letter to the Edmonton Journal, saying ""While the writer does not know anything about nuclear energy and is therefore not qualified to make any definite statement as to results he does know something about the effect dry heat has on those sands and ventures a guess that if it does not turn the whole deposit into a burning inferno it is almost sure to fuse it into a solid mass of semi glass or coke.""


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In April 1959, the Federal Mines Department approved Project Oilsand. However, before the project could continue beyond preliminary steps, the Canadian government's stance on the use of nuclear devices changed. In April 1962, the Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, Howard Charles Green, said "Canada is opposed to nuclear tests, period". These 1962 changes in Canadian public opinion is regarded by historian Michael Payne to be due to the shift in public perception of nuclear explosives following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Project Oilsand was subsequently cancelled. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker told Parliament that the decision to detonate an atomic bomb on or under Canadian soil would be made by Canada, not the United States, and ordered Project Cauldron/Oilsand placed on permanent hold, citing the risk of upsetting the Soviet Union during nuclear disarmament negotiations being conducted in Geneva.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The United States government continued with exploring the peaceful uses of nuclear detonations with Operation Plowshare, but was likewise eventually terminated in 1977.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Social scientist Benjamin Sovacool contends that the main problem was that the produced oil and gas was radioactive, which caused consumers to reject it. In contrast, oil and gas are sometimes considerably "naturally" radioactive to begin with and the industry is set up to deal with this, moreover in contrast to earlier stimulation efforts, contamination from many "later" tests was not a showstopping issue, it was primarily changing public opinion due to the societal fears caused by events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, that resulted in protests, court cases and general hostility that ended the US exploration. Furthermore, as the years went by without further development and the closing/curtailment in US nuclear weapons factories, this began to evaporate the economies of scale advantage that had earlier existed, with this, it was increasingly found that most US fields could instead be stimulated by non-nuclear techniques which were found to be likely cheaper. The most successful and profitable nuclear stimulation effort that did not result in customer product contamination issues was the 1976 Project Neva on the Sredne-Botuobinsk gas field in the Soviet Union, made possible by multiple cleaner stimulation explosives, favourable rock strata and the possible creation of an underground contaminant storage cavity.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The oil sands, which are typically thick and sit on top of relatively flat limestone, are relatively easy to access. They lie under of waterlogged muskeg, of clay and barren sand. As a result of the easy accessibility, the world's first oil-sands mine was in the Athabasca oil sands.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Commercial production of oil from the Athabasca oil sands began in 1967, with the opening of the Great Canadian Oil Sands (GCOS) plant in Fort McMurray. It was the first operational oil sands project in the world, owned and operated by the American parent company, Sun Oil Company. When the US$240 million plant officially opened with a capacity of , it marked the beginning of commercial development of the Athabasca oil sands. In 2013 McKenzie-Brown listed industrialist J. Howard Pew as one of the six visionaries who built the Athabasca oil sands. By the time of his death in 1971, the Pew family were ranked by "Forbes" magazine as one of the half-dozen wealthiest families in America. The Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited (then a subsidiary of Sun Oil Company but now incorporated into an independent company known as Suncor Energy Inc.) produced of synthetic crude oil.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The true size of the Canadian oil sands deposits became known in the 1970s. The Syncrude mine is now the largest mine (by area) in the world, with mines potentially covering . (Although there is oil underlying , which may be disturbed by drilling and in situ extraction, only may potentially be surface mined, and has to date been mined.)


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Development was inhibited by declining world oil prices, and the second mine, operated by the Syncrude consortium, did not begin operating until 1978, after the 1973 oil crisis sparked investor interest. However the price of oil subsided afterwards and although the 1979 energy crisis caused oil prices to peak again, during the 1980s, oil prices declined to very low levels causing considerable retrenchment in the oil industry.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In 1979, Sun formed Suncor by merging its Canadian refining and retailing interests with Great Canadian Oil Sands and its conventional oil and gas interests. In 1981, the Government of Ontario purchased a 25% stake in the company but divested it in 1993. In 1995, Sun Oil also divested its interest in the company, although Suncor maintained the Sunoco retail brand in Canada. Suncor took advantage of these two divestitures to become an independent, widely held public company.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Suncor continued to grow and continued to produce more and more oil from its oil sands operations regardless of fluctuating market prices, and eventually became bigger than its former parent company. In 2009, Suncor acquired the formerly Canadian government owned oil company, Petro-Canada, which turned Suncor into the largest petroleum company in Canada and one of the biggest Canadian companies. Suncor Energy is now a Canadian company completely unaffiliated with its former American parent company. Sun Oil Company became known as Sunoco, but later left the oil production and refining business, and has since become a retail gasoline distributor owned by Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas, Texas. In Canada, Suncor Energy converted all of its Sunoco stations (which were all in Ontario) to Petro-Canada sites in order to unify all of its downstream retail operations under the Petro-Canada banner and discontinue paying licensing fees for the Sunoco brand. Nationwide, Petro-Canada's upstream product supplier and parent company is Suncor Energy. Suncor Energy continues to operate just one Sunoco retail site in Ontario.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: At the turn of the 21st century, oil sands development in Canada started to take off, with an expansion at the Suncor mine, a new mine and expansion at Syncrude, and a new mine by Royal Dutch Shell associated with their new Scotford Upgrader near Edmonton. Three new large steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) projects were added – Foster Creek, Surmont, and MacKay River – by different companies, all of which have since been bought by larger companies.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Shell Canada's third mine began operating in 2003. However, as a result of oil price increases since 2003, the existing mines have been greatly expanded and new ones were built.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: According to the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, 2005 production of crude bitumen in the Athabasca oil sands was as follows:


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: As of 2006, oil sands production had increased to . Oil sands were by then the source of 62% of Alberta's total oil production and 47% of all oil produced in Canada. As of 2010, oil sands production had increased to over to exceed conventional oil production in Canada. 53% of this was produced by surface mining and 47% by in-situ techniques. In 2012, oil production from oil sands was .


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The massive development of tight oil extraction in the Bakken and Permian Basin in the United States transformed the oil industry rapidly, reducing importation of foreign oil dramatically. As with the oil sands, production costs of shale oil are higher than those of conventional oil. A combination of factors, among them oversupply and geopolitical rivalries, drove the price of oil down from more than 100 dollars a barrel in 2013 to less than 40 dollars three years later. Lingering low oil prices prompted companies to cancel new investments in the oil sands.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: From May to July 2016, a wildfire spread from Fort McMurray across northern Alberta, burning approximately 590,000 hectares (1,500,000 acres) of forested areas and destroying approximately 2,400 homes and buildings. 88,000 people were forced from their homes in what became the largest wildfire evacuation in Alberta's history and the costliest disaster in Canadian history.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The wildfire halted oil sands production at facilities north of Fort McMurray. Shell Canada shut down output at its Albian Sands mining operation. Suncor Energy and Syncrude Canada also scaled back operations and evacuated employees and their families. Approximately one million barrels of oil a day, equal to a quarter of Canada's oil production, was halted as a result of the fire in May. This continued into June at a rate of 700,000 barrels per day. The lost output was a contributing factor to rises in global oil prices. The scaled back operations, along with a refinery outage in Edmonton, caused many gas stations to run out of gas throughout Western Canada.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Until 2014, industry groups believed oil sands production levels could reach by 2030. As of 2021, after a slowdown in investment, analyst are predicting it could reach by that time.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Canada is the largest source of oil imported by the United States, supplying chiefly from oil sands sources as of 2019.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Industry observers went from believing there might be excess pipeline capacity to warning that it was insufficient to accommodate oil sands production growth, after several pipeline projects were abandoned or cancelled.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The North Gateway project to Kitimat, British Columbia, which would have been built by Enbridge, operator of the Enbridge Pipeline System which also serves the area, was cancelled in 2016. Similarly, after lengthy environmentalist and First Nation group opposition, Keystone XL, a pipeline project from Alberta to Gulf coast refineries, was cancelled in 2021. Other projects, using existing rights of way, are being built, like Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Expansion, nationalized in 2018, or Enbridge's Line 9, reversed to feed refineries in Quebec. Between January 2019 and December 2020, the Alberta government imposed a quota to adjust production to pipeline export capacity.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: To compensate for pipeline capacity limitations, shipment of oil by rail increased from less than 50 thousand to between 2012 and 2020.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: As of December 2008, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers revised its 2008–2020 crude oil forecasts to account for project cancellations and cutbacks as a result of the price declines in the second half of 2008. The revised forecast predicted that Canadian oil sands production would continue to grow, but at a slower rate than previously predicted. There would be minimal changes to 2008–2012 production, but by 2020 production could be less than its prior predictions. This would mean that Canadian oil sands production would grow from in 2008 to in 2020, and that total Canadian oil production would grow from in 2020. Even accounting for project cancellations, this would place Canada among the four or five largest oil-producing countries in the world by 2020.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In early December 2007, London-based BP and Calgary-based Husky Energy announced a 50–50 joint venture to produce and refine bitumen from the Athabasca oil sands. BP would contribute its Toledo, Ohio refinery to the joint venture, while Husky would contribute its Sunrise oil sands project. Sunrise was planned to start producing of bitumen in 2012 and may reach by 2015–2020. BP would modify its Toledo refinery to process of bitumen directly to refined products. The joint venture would solve problems for both companies, since Husky was short of refining capacity, and BP had no presence in the oil sands. It was a change of strategy for BP, since the company historically has downplayed the importance of oil sands.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In mid December 2007, ConocoPhillips announced its intention to increase its oil sands production from to over the next 20 years, which would make it the largest private sector oil sands producer in the world. ConocoPhillips currently holds the largest position in the Canadian oil sands with over under lease. Other major oil sands producers planning to increase their production include Royal Dutch Shell (to ); Syncrude Canada (to ); Suncor Energy (to ) and Canadian Natural Resources (to ). If all these plans come to fruition, these five companies will be producing over of oil from oil sands by 2028.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The governance of the Alberta oil sands is focused on economic development, and has historically been dominated by the interests of two primary actors; government (federal and provincial) and industry. Canadian federalism forms the functions and roles of each level of government, in that constitutional power is split so that neither is superior to the other. The Constitution Act, 1867, Section 109 ensures the province full ownership of the lands and resources within its borders. The province acts as the landowner and the federal government oversees jurisdiction over trade, commerce and taxation. There is a clear overlap, as resource management influences trade, and trade management influences resources. As of the 1990s, both the federal and provincial government have been aligned, focusing on regulation, technology and the development of new export markets. The majority of "ground-level" governance is carried out by a number of provincial institutions.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Ottawa has avoided direct investment, preferring to improve the investment climate. A prime example of this occurred in 1994, when the federal government rolled out tax breaks allowing 100% of oil sands capital investments to be written off as accelerated capital cost allowances. The provincial government had a much more direct role in development; investing directly in numerous pilot projects, undertaking joint ventures with the industry and consistently making massive investments in research and development. Some people have claimed that Alberta features one of the lowest royalty rates in the world. Since Alberta, unlike US states, owns the vast majority of oil under its surface it can exercise more control over it, whereas US states are limited to severance taxes. This industry-centric royalty system has been criticised for "promoting a runaway pace of development".


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Industry is the core force of oil sands development. The first major players, Suncor Energy and Syncrude, dominated the market until the 1990s. Currently there are 64 companies operating several hundred projects. The majority of production now comes from foreign-owned corporations, and the maintenance of a favourable climate for these corporations grants them strong influence; much stronger than that of non-productive stakeholders, such as citizens and environmental groups.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Governance (policy, administration, regulation) over the oil sands is held almost entirely by the Ministry of Energy (Alberta) and its various departments. Critics noted a clear and systemic lack of public involvement at all key stages of the governance process. In answer to this, the province initiated the Oil Sands Consultations Multistakeholder Committee (MSC) in 2006. The MSC represents four organisations: the Cumulative Environmental Management Association (CEMA), the Wood Buffalo Environmental Association (WBEA), the Canadian Oil Sands Network for Research and Development (CONRAD) and the Athabasca Regional Issues Working Group (RIWG). The role of the MSC is to consult and make recommendations on management principles. The recommendations contained in the MSC's first 2007 Final Report were lauded by several ministers and government representatives, but none have yet been effectively passed into law.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: On October 17, 2012, the Alberta government announced it would follow the recommendations of a working group to develop an agency that would monitor the environmental impact of the oil sands. "The new science-based agency will begin work in the oil sands region and will focus on what is monitored, how it's monitored and where it's monitored. This will include integrated and coordinated monitoring of land, air, water and biodiversity," said a press release from Diana McQueen's office, the Minister of Energy and Sustainable Development. The provincial government moved to develop the agency after widespread public criticism by environmentalists, aboriginal groups and scientists, who claimed the oil sands would have a devastating, long-term effect on the environment if left unchecked.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: On 17 June 2013 the newly formed corporation, Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) was phased in with a mandate to regulate oil, gas and coal development in Alberta including the Athabasca oil sands. The AER brings together "the regulatory functions from the Energy Resources Conservation Board and the Alberta Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development into a one-stop shop" The Alberta Energy Regulator is now "responsible for all projects from application to reclamation." They will respond to project proponents, landowners and industry regarding energy regulations in Alberta. The Responsible Energy Development Act gave the Alberta Energy Regulator "the authority to administer the Public Lands Act, the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act and the Water Act, with regards to energy development." The Alberta Energy Regulator will enforce environmental laws and issue environmental and water permits, responsibilities formerly the mandate of Alberta Environment.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The key characteristic of the Athabasca deposit is that it is the only one shallow enough to be suitable for surface mining. About 10% of the Athabasca oil sands are covered by less than of overburden. Until 2009, the surface mineable area (SMA) was defined by the ERCB, an agency of the Alberta government, to cover 37 contiguous townships (about ) north of Fort McMurray. In June 2009, the SMA was expanded to townships, or about . This expansion pushes the northern limit of the SMA to within of Wood Buffalo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Albian Sands mine (operated by Shell Canada) opened in 2003. All three of these mines are associated with bitumen upgraders that convert the unusable bitumen into synthetic crude oil for shipment to refineries in Canada and the United States. For Albian, the upgrader is located at Scotford, 439 km south. The bitumen, diluted with a solvent, is transferred there in a corridor pipeline.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Energy Resource Conservation Board has approved over 100 mining and in-situ projects despite the negative environmental impacts. As of 2012, there were 9 active open mining projects, more than 50 approved in-situ projects as well as 190 primary recovery projects extracting bitumen that is free flowing. The ERCB has also approved 20 projects that are testing unproven technology as well as new versions of existing technologies.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Since Great Canadian Oil Sands (now Suncor) started operation of its mine in 1967, bitumen has been extracted on a commercial scale from the Athabasca Oil Sands by surface mining. In the Athabasca sands there are very large amounts of bitumen covered by little overburden, making surface mining the most efficient method of extracting it. The overburden consists of water-laden muskeg (peat bog) over top of clay and barren sand. The oil sands themselves are typically deep, sitting on top of flat limestone rock. Originally, the sands were mined with draglines and bucket-wheel excavators and moved to the processing plants by conveyor belts.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: These early mines had a steep learning curve to deal with before their bitumen mining techniques became efficient. In the intervening years, more effective in-situ production techniques were developed, particularly steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). In-situ methods became increasingly important because only about 20% of the Athabasca oil sands were shallow enough to recover by surface mining, and the SAGD method in particular was very efficient at recovering large amounts of bitumen at a reasonable cost.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In recent years, companies such as Syncrude and Suncor have switched to much cheaper shovel-and-truck operations using the biggest power shovels (at least ) and dump trucks () in the world. This has held production costs to around US$27 per barrel of synthetic crude oil despite rising energy and labour costs.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: After excavation, hot water and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) is added to the sand, and the resulting slurry is piped to the extraction plant where it is agitated and the oil skimmed from the top. Provided that the water chemistry is appropriate to allow bitumen to separate from sand and clay, the combination of hot water and agitation releases bitumen from the oil sand, and allows small air bubbles to attach to the bitumen droplets. The bitumen froth floats to the top of separation vessels, and is further treated to remove residual water and fine solids.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: About of oil sands are required to produce one barrel () of oil. Originally, roughly 75% of the bitumen was recovered from the sand. However, recent enhancements to this method include Tailings Oil Recovery (TOR) units which recover oil from the tailings, Diluent Recovery Units to recover naphtha from the froth, inclined plate settlers (IPS) and disc centrifuges. These allow the extraction plants to recover well over 90% of the bitumen in the sand. After oil extraction, the spent sand and other materials are then returned to the mine, which is eventually reclaimed.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Alberta Taciuk Process technology extracts bitumen from oil sands through a dry retorting. During this process, oil sand is moved through a rotating drum, cracking the bitumen with heat and producing lighter hydrocarbons. Although tested, this technology is not in commercial use yet.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The original process for extraction of bitumen from the sands was developed by Dr. Karl Clark, working with the Alberta Research Council in the 1920s. Today, all of the producers doing surface mining, such as Syncrude Canada, Suncor Energy and Albian Sands Energy etc., use a variation of the Clark Hot Water Extraction (CHWE) process. In this process, the ores are mined using open-pit mining technology. The mined ore is then crushed for size reduction. Hot water at is added to the ore and the formed slurry is transported using hydrotransport line to a primary separation vessel (PSV) where bitumen is recovered by flotation as bitumen froth. The recovered bitumen froth consists of 60% bitumen, 30% water and 10% solids by weight.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The recovered bitumen froth needs to be cleaned to reject the contained solids and water to meet the requirement of downstream upgrading processes. Depending on the bitumen content in the ore, between 90 and 100% of the bitumen can be recovered using modern hot water extraction techniques. After oil extraction, the spent sand and other materials are then returned to the mine, which is eventually reclaimed.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) is an enhanced oil recovery technology for producing heavy crude oil and bitumen. It is an advanced form of steam stimulation in which a pair of horizontal wells are drilled into the oil reservoir, one a few metres above the other. High pressure steam is continuously injected into the upper wellbore to heat the oil and reduce its viscosity, causing the heated oil to drain into the lower wellbore, where it is pumped out to a bitumen recovery facility. Dr. Roger Butler, engineer at Imperial Oil from 1955 to 1982, invented steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) in the 1970s. Butler "developed the concept of using horizontal pairs of wells and injected steam to develop certain deposits of bitumen considered too deep for mining."


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: More recently, "in situ" methods like steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) and cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) have been developed to extract bitumen from deep deposits by injecting steam to heat the sands and reduce the bitumen viscosity so that it can be pumped out like conventional crude oil.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The standard extraction process requires huge amounts of natural gas. As of 2007, the oil sands industry used about 4% of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin natural gas production. By 2015, this may increase two-and-a-half-fold.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: According to the National Energy Board, it requires about of natural gas to produce one barrel of bitumen from "in situ" projects and about for integrated projects. Since a barrel of oil equivalent is about of gas, this represents a large gain in energy. That being the case, it is likely that Alberta regulators will reduce exports of natural gas to the United States in order to provide fuel to the oil sands plants. As gas reserves are exhausted, however, oil upgraders will probably turn to bitumen gasification to generate their own fuel. In much the same way as bitumen can be converted into synthetic crude oil, it can also be converted into synthetic natural gas.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Approximately 20% of Alberta's oil sands are recoverable through open-pit mining, while 80% require "in situ" extraction technologies (largely because of their depth). Open pit mining destroys the boreal forest and muskeg, while "in situ" extraction technologies cause less significant damage. Approximately 0.19% of the Alberta boreal forest has been disturbed by open pit mining. The Alberta government requires companies to restore the land to "equivalent land capability". This means that the ability of the land to support various land uses after reclamation is similar to what existed, but that the individual land uses may not necessarily be identical.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In some particular circumstances the government considers agricultural land to be equivalent to forest land. Oil sands companies have reclaimed mined land to use as pasture for wood bison instead of restoring it to the original boreal forest and muskeg. Syncrude asserts they have reclaimed 22% of their disturbed land, a figure disputed by other sources, who assess Syncrude more accurately reclaimed only 0.2% of its disturbed land.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: A Pembina Institute report stated "To produce one cubic metre (m) [] of synthetic crude oil (SCO) (upgraded bitumen) in a mining operation requires about of water (net figures). Approved oil sands mining operations are currently licensed to divert 359 million m from the Athabasca River, or more than twice the volume of water required to meet the annual municipal needs of the City of Calgary." It went on to say "...the net water requirement to produce a cubic metre of oil with "in situ" production may be as little as , depending on how much is recycled".


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Athabasca River runs from the Athabasca Glacier in west-central Alberta to Lake Athabasca in northeastern Alberta. The average annual flow just downstream of Fort McMurray is with its highest daily average measuring 1,200 cubic metres per second.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Water licence allocations total about 1% of the Athabasca River average annual flow, though actual withdrawals for all uses, in 2006, amount to about 0.4%. In addition, the Alberta government sets strict limits on how much water oil sands companies can remove from the Athabasca River. According to the Water Management Framework for the Lower Athabasca River, during periods of low river flow water consumption from the Athabasca River is limited to 1.3% of annual average flow. The province of Alberta is also looking into cooperative withdrawal agreements between oil sands operators.