Author Archive
Thomas Ball’s best photograph: Canada’s oil sands in Alberta
Posted by Guardian: Sarah Phillips on August 29th, 2012
Guardian: In August 2007 I travelled to northern Alberta in Canada, to photograph the mining of oil sands. The owner of this mine, Syncrude, is the largest and oldest of the oil sands companies, producing more than 350,000 barrels a day. Oil sands release three times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil sources, and the extraction process has turned vast swaths of boreal forest into a desert-like landscape, pockmarked by toxic lakes. I wanted to show how desperate things have become that we are using...