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Boreal Plains Ecozone
The Boreal Plains Ecozone, as defined by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), is a terrestrial ecozone in the western Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. It also has minor extensions into northeastern British Columbia and south-central Northwest Territories. The region extends over 779,471 km2, of which 58,981 km2 is conserved (7.6 percent). Wood Buffalo National Park, the largest national park in Canada, and Whooping Crane Summer Range, the only nesting and breeding area for the critically endangered whooping crane, are both located in the northern portion of this ecozone. Industry in this ecozone once consisted primarily of forestry and agriculture, but in 1967 Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited began extracting bitumen from the Athabasca oil sands. Operations there have expanded significantly since 2003, and the oil sands are becoming an increasingly significant economic factor in the region. Geography Overlaying a bedrock of Cret ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boreal Cordillera
The Boreal Cordillera Ecozone, as defined by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), is a Canadian terrestrial ecozone occupying most of the northern third of British Columbia and southern half of Yukon. Within it is found Kluane National Park and Reserve, and a small portion of the southern range of Nahanni National Park Reserve. Most of the area's population is based in the city of Whitehorse, and it contains most of Yukon's population. The portion in British Columbia is barely populated. The main economic activity is mining, particularly of gold, which discovery in the region led to the Klondike Gold Rush. In addition to the area's rich mineral deposits, active industries exist in forestry and tourism. Geography This mountainous ecozone is between the Montane Cordillera Ecozone to the south-east and the Taiga Cordillera Ecozone to the north. The three zones contain the Canadian Rockies. To the east are the Taiga Plains, and to the west is Alaska, though the ecoz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Whooping Crane Summer Range
Whooping Crane Summer Range is a 16,895-km2 wetland complex in the boreal forests of northern Alberta and southwestern Northwest Territories in Canada. It is the only natural nesting habitat for the endangered whooping crane. On May 24, 1982, it was designated a Ramsar wetland of international importance, one of two such sites in Wood Buffalo National Park (the other is Peace-Athabasca Delta). It is owned by the government of Canada, and is administered by Parks Canada with some input from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Encompassing the northeastern portion of Wood Buffalo National Park, about 2,300 km2 (14%) of the wetland is external to the park, on Crown land in the Northwest Territories. It is also classified an Important Bird Area. The range is a complex of contiguous water bodies, primarily lakes and various wetlands, such as marshes and bogs, but also includes streams and ponds. In addition to the whooping crane nesting area, the range includes two sites ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taiga Shield
The Taiga Shield Ecozone, as defined by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), is an ecozone which stretches across Canada's subarctic region. Some regions exhibit exposed Precambrian bedrock of the Canadian Shield, the oldest of the world's geological formations. The world's oldest rocks, dating to four billion years, are found in the Canadian Shield north of Great Slave Lake. Geography The Taiga Shield ecozone covers almost all of the eastern area of the Northwest Territories, a tiny corner of northeastern Alberta, a narrow strip of all northern Saskatchewan and northwestern Manitoba, as well as all some parts of southern Nunavut. Here, it is interrupted by Hudson Bay, where it abuts with the marine ecozone of the Arctic Archipelago Marine, and resumes on the eastern shores of Hudson Bay on the coast of Quebec, where it continues in a consistently-wide strip towards the ocean, encompassing all but a small portion of Labrador. It is one of the largest ecozones in Cana ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prairies (ecozone)
The Prairies Ecozone is a Canadian terrestrial Ecozones of Canada, ecozone which spans the southern areas of the Canadian Prairies, Prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. It is a productive agriculture, agricultural area, and is commonly referred to as "Canada's breadbasket". Farmland covers about 94% of the land, and is the dominant domestic economic activity of the zone, as well as an important factor in Canadian foreign trade. Natural gas and Petroleum, oil are abundant in the area. The corresponding Level II ecoregion of the US Environmental Protection Agency is the List of ecoregions in the United States (EPA)#Northwestern Forested Mountains, Great Plains Ecoregion. Geography Following Alberta's border with British Columbia, this ecozone is adjacent to the Montane Cordillera on the west. The two zones are bifurcated by the Boreal Plains about 70 kilometres southwest of Calgary, which also wraps around the remaining extent of the zone north of the United Stat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
McGill University
McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, 1801–1895.'' McGill-Queen's University Press, 1980. the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university's precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885. McGill's main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal in the borough of Ville-Marie, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, west of the main campus on Montreal Island. The university is one of two members of the Association of American Universities located outside the United States, alongside the University of Toronto, and is the only Canadian member of the Glob ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interior Plains
The Interior Plains is a vast Physiographic province, physiographic region that spreads across the Laurentia, Laurentian craton of central North America, extending along the east flank of the Rocky Mountains from the Gulf Coast region to the Arctic Beaufort Sea. In Canada, it encompasses the Canadian Prairies separating the Canadian Rockies from the Canadian Shield, as well as the Boreal Plains and Taiga Plains east of the Mackenzie Mountains, Mackenzie and Richardson Mountains; while in the United States, it includes the Great Plains of the western United States, West/Midwest and the tallgrass prairie region to the south of the Great Lakes extending east to the Appalachian Plateau region. Geologic history A series of tectonic plate collisions in the crust that formed the center of the North American continent laid the groundwork for the modern-day interior plains. Mountain building and erosion around the plains as well as flooding from inland seas provided sediments that make up t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soil
Soil, also commonly referred to as earth or dirt, is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support life. Some scientific definitions distinguish ''dirt'' from ''soil'' by restricting the former term specifically to displaced soil. Soil consists of a solid phase of minerals and organic matter (the soil matrix), as well as a porous phase that holds gases (the soil atmosphere) and water (the soil solution). Accordingly, soil is a three-state system of solids, liquids, and gases. Soil is a product of several factors: the influence of climate, relief (elevation, orientation, and slope of terrain), organisms, and the soil's parent materials (original minerals) interacting over time. It continually undergoes development by way of numerous physical, chemical and biological processes, which include weathering with associated erosion. Given its complexity and strong internal connectedness, soil ecologists regard soil as an ecosystem. Most ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tertiary
Tertiary ( ) is a widely used but obsolete term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago. The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, at the start of the Cenozoic Era, and extended to the beginning of the Quaternary glaciation at the end of the Pliocene Epoch. The time span covered by the Tertiary has no exact equivalent in the current geologic time system, but it is essentially the merged Paleogene and Neogene periods, which are informally called the Early Tertiary and the Late Tertiary, respectively. The Tertiary established the Antarctic as an icy island continent. Historical use of the term The term Tertiary was first used by Giovanni Arduino during the mid-18th century. He classified geologic time into primitive (or primary), secondary, and tertiary periods based on observations of geology in Northern Italy. Later a fourth period, the Quaternary, was applied. In the early d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cretaceous
The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of the entire Phanerozoic. The name is derived from the Latin ''creta'', "chalk", which is abundant in the latter half of the period. It is usually abbreviated K, for its German translation ''Kreide''. The Cretaceous was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high eustatic sea levels that created numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now- extinct marine reptiles, ammonites, and rudists, while dinosaurs continued to dominate on land. The world was ice free, and forests extended to the poles. During this time, new groups of mammals and birds appeared. During the Early Cretaceous, flowering plants appeared and began to rapidly diversify, becoming the dominant group of plants across the Earth b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bedrock
In geology, bedrock is solid Rock (geology), rock that lies under loose material (regolith) within the crust (geology), crust of Earth or another terrestrial planet. Definition Bedrock is the solid rock that underlies looser surface material. An exposed portion of bedrock is often called an outcrop. The various kinds of broken and weathered rock material, such as soil and subsoil, that may overlie the bedrock are known as regolith. Engineering geology The surface of the bedrock beneath the soil cover (regolith) is also known as ''rockhead'' in engineering geology, and its identification by digging, drilling or geophysics, geophysical methods is an important task in most civil engineering projects. Superficial deposition (geology), deposits can be very thick, such that the bedrock lies hundreds of meters below the surface. Weathering of bedrock Exposed bedrock experiences weathering, which may be physical or chemical, and which alters the structure of the rock to leave ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Canadian Oil Sands
Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited was a Canadian heavy oil company that existed between 1953 and 1979. In 1962, GCOS received a permit from the Alberta government to build a 31,500 barrels-per-day synthetic crude plant in the Athabasca oil sands. The following year, Sun Oil acquired an 83 percent stake in the company and in 1964 construction of the plant began. When GCOS opened its plant on 30 September 1967, it became the first company in the world to produce heavy oil commercially. In 1979, Sun merged its Canadian subsidiary, the Sun Company of Canada, with GCOS to form Suncor. History Pre-history, 1920–1953 Great Canadian Oil Sands originated in the early 1920s, when a group of policemen from New York acquired oil leases in Athabasca and formed the Alcan Oil Company. In 1923, the group sold the venture to Robert Cosmas Fitzsimmons (1881-1971). Fitzsimmons spent the next several years drilling on the leases he had acquired, but was unsuccessful. Inspired by the work of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
