Initial environmental impacts of the Obed Mountain coal mine process water spill into the Athabasca River (Alberta, Canada)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On October 31, 2013, a catastrophic release of approximately 670,000m(3) of coal process water occurred as the result of the failure of the wall of a post-processing settling pond at the Obed Mountain Mine near Hinton, Alberta. A highly turbid plume entered the Athabasca River approximately 20km from the mine, markedly altering the chemical composition of the Athabasca River as it flowed downstream. The released plume traveled approximately 1100km downstream to the Peace-Athabasca Delta in approximately four weeks, and was tracked both visually and using real-time measures of river water turbidity within the Athabasca River. The plume initially contained high concentrations of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus), metals, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs); some Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environmental (CCME) Guidelines were exceeded in the initial days after the spill. Subsequent characterization of the source material revealed elevated concentrations of both metals (arsenic, lead, mercury, selenium, and zinc) and PAHs (acenaphthene, fluorene, naphthalene, phenanthrene, and pyrene). While toxicity testing using the released material indicated a relatively low or short-lived acute risk to the aquatic environment, some of the water quality and sediment quality variables are known carcinogens and have the potential to exert negative long-term impacts.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".