Creating artificial lakes as a reclamation tool in the oilsands is a process currently being experimented with. As this Maclean's Magazine article describes, the process has pros and cons. Base Mine Lake in the Alberta oilsands is an large-scale test site for Syncrude Canada. Smaller-scale test sites have successfully compressed tailings at the bottom of the pit, but the Base Mine Lake site is 200 times larger than any previous site.
