50 Incredible Geography Facts About Alberta That Will Blow Your Mind

If someone asked you to name a Canadian province famous for geography, you'd say British Columbia. Mountains, fjords, rainforest, Pacific coastline. And you'd be right. But Alberta is something else entirely. In this video, we go through 50 geography facts about Alberta that most people — including most Albertans — have never fully understood. In this video, we explore: → Why the Canadian Rockies are geologically upside down — 600-million-year-old rock sitting on top of rock that's only 75 million years old, pushed there by horizontal plate tectonics → The single point in North America where meltwater drains to three separate oceans simultaneously — Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic — all from one icefield → The 1962 Chinook that raised the temperature in Pincher Creek 41 degrees Celsius in one hour — from -19°C to +22°C — and why that's physically possible → Why the dinosaur fossils in Alberta's badlands predate the Rocky Mountains — because when those animals were alive, Alberta was a coastal plain on the edge of an inland sea → The hoodoos of Drumheller and why every single one of them is temporary — actively collapsing on a geological timeline you can measure in decades → The oil sands covering an area larger than Florida, containing four times the proven oil reserves of the entire United States — buried under boreal forest you can walk through without seeing a pump jack → The largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history, when 88,000 people fled Fort McMurray in 2016 — the oil sands city evacuated by a climate-associated fire → The prairie pothole region responsible for hatching 50 to 80 percent of all ducks produced in North America → The 6,000-year food production system at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump — bone deposits 12 metres deep at the base of a cliff — that was functionally destroyed in a single generation → The boreal peatlands of northern Alberta storing approximately 23 billion tonnes of carbon — more than the entire atmosphere currently holds in CO2 → The explorer who mapped 4 million square kilometres of North American interior and whose surveys of Alberta's geography still form the foundation of what we know today → Why the drinking water supply for 85 percent of Albertans is directly connected to a glacier that's currently retreating at measurable speed Fifty facts. One province. Every part of it a process, not just a place — and the processes that built it are not finished. Which fact surprised you most? Drop it in the comments — and subscribe for more Canadian geography done this way. #Alberta #CanadaFacts #AlbertaGeography #WeirdCanada #CanadianHistory #FunFacts #GhostCanada #DidYouKnow #Geology