Coupled fluid flow, heat and mass transport, and erosion in the Alberta basin: implications for the origin of the Athabasca oil sands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Regional topography-driven flow systems related to Laramide tectonic rebound were simulated using two-dimensional, coupled fluid-flow, heat transport, and solute transport numerical models to replicate present formation water salinity and temperature distributions and investigate the accumulation of the Athabasca oil sands. Previous modelling of this system was replicated, and it predicted repeated replacement of all basin formation water with freshwater during deposition of the oil sands due to high permeabilities. To match present Alberta basin temperature and salinity distributions, model hydrostratigraphy, permeabilities, and heat fluxes were adjusted. This revised model conducts fluids along the Mannville aquifer, rather than the Upper Devonian aquifer, and replicates present salinity distributions, assuming instantaneous uplift around 60 Ma. Fluid fluxes in principal aquifers decrease by two-orders of magnitude using new permeabilities, resulting in primarily conductive heat transport. Thus, genesis of the Athabasca oil sands cannot be explained by dissolved-phase petroleum transport due to low simulated fluxes. Model simulations representing constant erosion of a higher topographic gradient produce similar flow patterns, but fluid fluxes, temperatures and hydraulic heads uniformly decrease over 58 million years. Increased erosion rates in the last stage of simulations produce sub-hydrostatic pressures near the uplift, which trigger a flow reversal in the basin. Thinning of the capping Cretaceous aquitard and Mannville permeability distribution causes discharge in the vicinity of the Peace River, coincident with Peace River oil sands and solonetzic soil zones. Regional topography-driven flow gradually decays via diminishing fluid fluxes, underpressuring near the disturbed belt, and development of local flow sub-systems driven by small-scale relief.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".