Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds (PACs) in Alberta’s Oil Sands Tailing Ponds: Levels and Reassessment of Emissions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) are semi volatile organic compounds emitted from Alberta’s oil sands tailing ponds (OSTPs). They have been classified as priority compounds for monitoring because of their toxicity and environmental ubiquity. Alberta’s open-air OSTPs have large surface areas from which PACs can volatize. Water analysis from four different OSTPs taken at different times were analyzed for targeted PACs, where magnitude differences in concentrations between ponds showed spatial heterogeneity. An equilibrium chamber study was devised to determine the air-OSTP water partition coefficients for PACs. Air-OSTP water partition coefficients were found to be 10-59% lower than literature values depending on the compound. With these newly determined partition coefficient values, this research also estimated point-in-time fluxes of PACs from four different ponds. Flux estimates can vary as much as 5 orders of magnitudes between ponds.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".