Jeremy J Schmidt

Some time ago, I noticed that the Alberta Geological Survey had produced an extension to the game Minecraft. I was curious about it, since it allowed players to virtually mine bitumen in Peace River. Why, I wondered, would the Alberta Geological Survey bother to do this?

It turns out the AGS has made several extensions to Minecraft, including one where you can explore dinosaur bones at Drumheller (a world famous site). Still, mining bitumen caught my intention so I started investigating. It turns out that the reason that there was data about Peace River in the first place owed to complaints from residents about noxious odours that had given many health problems and forced some from their homes. In other words, the Minecraft extension that allows you to virtually mine bitumen owed its existence to how the Alberta government’s responded to environmental health concerns arising from actual oil sands operations.

In this new article, I use the Minecraft extension as an entry point for thinking about how data, and the infrastructure that supports data collection, retention, and use, figures more broadly in extractive practices in Alberta. It’s free to download and read the open-access article, which is now available in the journal Geo: Geography and Environment here. I combine the studies that gave rise to the Minecraft extension with a broader historical analysis to help draw further attention to how the environment is understood through knowledge gained from extraction. There are old maps (of course!) and an effort to give a bit more attention to Peace River, which is the second largest of Alberta’s three main oil sands areas, though currently the smallest in terms of production. You can dowload the pdf freely below.

The AGS also provides data for printing your own versions of Alberta’s geology so I also made a 3-D print of the minecraft model of Alberta’s geology, pictured below. I suppose it is also worth noting that I had no idea there was a movie being made about Minecraft when I wrote this, and that when I approached the project it was not about what playing Minecraft in this context was like. I was interested in the data because virtually all of Alberta’s core samples and data is an outcome of extraction.