Sphagnum Moss in the Athabasca Bituminous Sands Region Reveals No Significant Atmospheric Contamination by "Heavy Metals"
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sphagnum moss were collected from three sites at each of twenty-one ombrotrophic (rain-fed) peat bogs in the vicinity of and surrounding\nopen pit mines and upgrading facilities of Athabasca Bituminous Sands in Alberta. Compared with contemporary Sphagnum moss from multiple\nsites at each of four bogs in rural locations of southern Germany, the AB mosses yielded lower concentrations of Ag, Cd, Ni, Pb, Sb and Tl,\nsimilar concentrations of Mo, but greater concentrations of Ba, Th and V. Compared to the “cleanest”, ancient peat samples ever tested from the\nnorthern hemisphere and dating from the mid-Holocene (ca. 6,000 to 9,000 years old), with the exception of V, the concentrations of each of\nthese metals in the AB mosses are within a factor of three of “natural, background” values. The concentrations of “heavy metals” in the mosses\nare proportional to the concentration of Th (a conservative, lithogenic element) and therefore are contributed to the plants primarily in the\nform of mineral dust particles. Although it has been claimed that bitumen mining is a significant source of atmospheric Pb contamination,\ncompared with the surface layer (1 cm slice) of peat cores collected in recent years from across Canada (13 cores in five Provinces from British\nColumbia to New Brunswick), the Pb concentrations in the mosses from AB are far lower. Vanadium, the single most abundant trace metal in\nbitumen, is the only exception: on average V in the AB mosses exceeds that of ancient peat by a factor of six; it is therefore enriched in the mosses, relative to Th, by a factor of two.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.037 |
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 it