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Area of Gulf Oil Spill Compared to the GTA

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Not sure which forum is appropriate for this post, but I was struck by a Google Earth application that allows the current extent of the Gulf oil slick to be superimposed on any location on Earth, and the oil slick data is derived from the most recent available at Google's Oil Spill crisis response centre

It requires that you have the Google Earth browser plugin installed in your browser (I think installation of the standalone Google Earth application also installs the plugin--I don't remember exactly).

As an idea of how things are today, here's a screen capture of the slick superimposed on the GTA. I specified "Toronto" as the location, which has led to the somewhat ironic situation that Oshawa, that industrial temple to gas-guzzling locomotion, is out of the actual oil slick area today!


paulrademacher_com_oilspill_Toronto.jpg
 

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If only we had that large oilfield right here in GTA...


B-b-b-but it's an oil SLICK, not an oil field! :rolleyes: I mean, I know cities in the GTA desperately need other sources of revenue, but do we really need to start drilling municipal oil wells, even if the local geology offered some hope of discoveries (which I believe is not the case)?!? There must be some other innovative solutions to municipal finances possible in our god forsaken province?
 
I'd prefer it if the GTA didn't make it's money off of oil. Not only is that industry very unsustainable, I'd rather as much oil stay in the Earth as is possible.

But I'm wondering if there's any interesting mineral, ore or other type of material around in the urbanized part of the GTA. Imagine if you could pay someone to knock out a swath of useless subdivisions, get several years of money and jobs out of mining, and then put mid-density developments when it's done. At the very least, take out all of the wonderful soil that Toronto's sitting on and transplant it to farms outside the city.
 
^OT, but I wonder where all the soil that gets excavated out of construction sites goes. Every time I travel south on the DVP during the afternoon rush hour, I count about 30-40 dump trucks heading north loaded with fill.
 
Second_in_pie;406089 But I'm wondering if there's any interesting mineral said:
I replied to this a couple of days ago, but somehow my reply did not get added to the thread. In short summary:
1) Constructing the suburbs basically destroys any existing soil structure that has been built up by decades of cultivation--so there is no way back to the "Grade A" agricultural land that was replaced by the suburban sprawl;
2) Remediation of the landscape scars left by extractive industries back to useful natural lands is not an easy thing, even when Mother Nature is working her best. An example (but not of an extractive industry) close to downtown Toronto is the Leslie Street Spit ("Tommy Thompson Park"), a dumping ground for urban demolition & excavation, where a policy of leaving it a nature reserve has had huge results already, but even that required a carefully designed programme of human intervention to create certain kinds of habitat and physical features.

I'm sure demolishing suburban shopping centres and replacing them with open-pit mines would probably mean higher value employment for many people (and certainly fits into the urban planning policy of preserving employment areas), but the problem still remains of what to do with the landscape after the mine is closed.

Mind you, somewhere on the relevant government web sites, there must be mineralogical maps of the GTA. I have no idea if you can start staking mineral claims within municipal boundaries... Will the OMB somehow get involved?... All of us on UT will be fascinated to learn how far you can get!
 
Yes, it works on the oil spill page I linked to, but only if I use either Internet Explorer 8 or the latest version 3.7a4 of Firefox on Windows 7; I still use Firefox 3.0.20 (outdated) as my regular browser, I'm waiting for 3.6.4 to be released. To use the Google Earth Windows version plugin in Firefox 3.6.4+, you will probably have to go to the about:config page and set dom.ipc.plugins.enabled to false since the Google Earth plugin does not appear to work out-of-process.

As for the oil spill, today it would cover an even greater area of Southern Ontario:

paulrademacher_com_oilspill_Toronto_20100602.jpg


Really, really, REALLY sad for the nature and people actually affected by this wanton destruction.
 

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^^ It is quite unfortunate. Another reason to oppose the oil industry.
Update on the map: sucks that Woodstock's under a giant slick now. If only that little tail could shimmy it's way over to Buffalo :rolleyes:

1) Constructing the suburbs basically destroys any existing soil structure that has been built up by decades of cultivation--so there is no way back to the "Grade A" agricultural land that was replaced by the suburban sprawl;
Ah, I was worried about that. That's quite unfortunate, but does shed a lot of light.

2) Remediation of the landscape scars left by extractive industries back to useful natural lands is not an easy thing, even when Mother Nature is working her best. An example (but not of an extractive industry) close to downtown Toronto is the Leslie Street Spit ("Tommy Thompson Park"), a dumping ground for urban demolition & excavation, where a policy of leaving it a nature reserve has had huge results already, but even that required a carefully designed programme of human intervention to create certain kinds of habitat and physical features.
I was really just thinking of turning mines back over to the urban fabric when they're exhausted, not back to nature. I could definitely see benefits, as it'd allow the government or developers to sidestep the costs of herding up an entire subdivision by getting another profit off of the demolition. For long term city building, I think the opportunity to economically replace suburban housing tracts with even mid-density housing (4-5 story type thing,) would be well worth it.
 
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^^
I was really just thinking of turning mines back over to the urban fabric when they're exhausted, not back to nature. I could definitely see benefits, as it'd allow the government or developers to sidestep the costs of herding up an entire subdivision by getting another profit off of the demolition. For long term city building, I think the opportunity to economically replace suburban housing tracts with even mid-density housing (4-5 story type thing,) would be well worth it.

No doubt that replacement strategy is a good one, but the ex-mine land would still have to be remediated and some green areas must be created--you don't want a 100% urban area, I think, the only way we sorry misled humans are going to begin to live in harmony with nature is if we care enough to have it constantly around us.
 
I definitely agree 100% there, but I think there's still room for parkland. Even if it's just at the fringes of the development and as rooftop gardens/greenspace, it could potentially be a similar environment to modern suburban areas in terms of park coverage.
 
I hope I did not give the impression I'm for wall-to-wall urban development with just green accents here and there: real park land, as you say, is important. "Green lungs" is not just a figure of speech.

One of the big problems in Ontario is that urban development territorial limits seem to be entirely flexible, there's always some excuse given by municipal authorities (or given to them by the OMB) to take land out of the natural or agricultural reserve and let it be built on. And sometimes the relevant urban planning authorities say, "Oh, we can't be completely rigid about this, we have to adapt to changing circumstances and pressures..." and, whammo, another 1000 hectares is given up to the low/medium density single family home nonsense!

Well, I'm not an urban planner, but what I'd like to see around the GTA is something like high density towns surrounded by a combination of agricultural and natural land--no single family homes at all, really, just a mix of apartments and innovatve forms of row/town housiing. But of course, most of the agricultural/open land in the GTA is already built over in another fashion, opportunities forever lost, alas.
 
Again, exactly what I'd like to see. In fact, I've been working on specific designs for several such types of towns. I figure that it'd be very cool if the population of rural Ontario could triple and reach European densities, all while maintaining our current farmland and greenspace, maybe even reclaiming some from very sprawley towns. And on top of that, you could get the type of density and interaction one might attribute to rennaisance-era European towns and marketplaces across the world (with a Canadian stability, of course.) One of my designs is basically a 700x700 m town, containing ~ 5k people and "walled" so that there's an obvious urban-rural boundary. One minute you can experience a vibrant streetscape, maybe play a pickup game of tennis on a rooftop with your neighbor, and the next one be wandering through farm fields, or a park, or a forest.

There's a fair amount of land required in an open pit mine that isn't stripped. That has some potential to become sports fields or flatter parks. Or you could do a Christie Pits-style park along the side.

Though this discussion is based on an assumption that there are resources worth extracting buried underneath the subdivisions of the GTA :rolleyes:
 
And I also think classical Italian hill-towns are also a model in terms of urban layout and amenities, with the physical setting helping to maintain a sharp urban/rural separation in density. With fast LRT connecting such urban dots, the cultural/social associations among these "isolated" communities can be assured--in effect recreating the vibrancy of big-scale urban development, but on a more nature respecting basis.

As for open pit mines, maybe I've seen too many Edward Burtynsky photos! Open pit mines in his images remind me of Dante's Levels of Hell. Not much that isn't stripped.

Of course, I was joking about the potential mineralogical wealth under the ghastly sprawl. Most of the land in S. Ontario is some kind of glacial till, isn't it? Not promising for such geological lottery prizes like kimberlite pipes. Oh well...
 
And I also think classical Italian hill-towns are also a model in terms of urban layout and amenities, with the physical setting helping to maintain a sharp urban/rural separation in density. With fast LRT connecting such urban dots, the cultural/social associations among these "isolated" communities can be assured--in effect recreating the vibrancy of big-scale urban development, but on a more nature respecting basis.
Pretty much my intention there, and what I think would be great for southern Ontario and Quebec. A constant, well-knit urban fabric, but venture outside the towns and you're in the middle of farmland or forest.

Of course, I was joking about the potential mineralogical wealth under the ghastly sprawl. Most of the land in S. Ontario is some kind of glacial till, isn't it? Not promising for such geological lottery prizes like kimberlite pipes. Oh well...
There may not be any precious metals, but I'm willing to bet that there are areas that have useful materials. Gravel and stone would be obvious candidates, considering how many gravel pits there are out in the greenbelt. And by digging for gravel in the GTA, you might be able to close a pit out in the greenbelt that's actually destroying natural land. Now that I think of it, there must be some areas in the GTA that'd be good for getting gravel and other stuff from.
 

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