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tar sand
noun
: a natural impregnation of sand or sandstone with petroleum from which the lighter portions have escaped
Examples of tar sand in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
Vaillant weaves together the story of the tar sands industry, the impacts of climate change and the white-knuckle evacuation of the town into a frightening wake-up call of our new reality concerning wildfires.
—Bridget Alex, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 Dec. 2023
Fort McMurray is in the middle of Alberta’s tar sands, or bituminous sands.
—Bridget Alex, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 Dec. 2023
The growth in fossil-fuel financing among Canadian institutions may be explained by recent demand from the tar sand industry, Maaike Beenes, the campaign lead at BankTrack, told S&P Global.
—Michelle Cheng, Quartz, 13 Apr. 2023
One of those spills, a 2010 release of more than 1 million gallons of sludgy tar sand soil into a Michigan creek polluted a nearly 40-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River.
—Dylan Lovan, Star Tribune, 12 Mar. 2021
The $8 billion pipeline would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, through Nebraska and ultimately to refineries in Texas.
—Savannah Behrmann, USA TODAY, 18 May 2020
Instead of lubricating profits, however, Canada’s tar sands are bunged-up with protests against new pipelines.
—The Economist, 27 Feb. 2020
The company made a number of oil-intensive investments, such as extraction in the Alberta, Canada, tar sands, that would have been dramatically less profitable if calculated with a high cost of carbon.
—Irina Ivanova, CBS News, 22 Oct. 2019
This financing—which has included supporting the most extreme oil and gas projects, like the huge pipelines planned in Canada’s uniquely filthy tar sands complex—is perhaps the single least defensible part of the fossil fuel enterprise.
—Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books, 25 Feb. 2020
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tar sand.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
First Known Use
1899, in the meaning defined above
Dictionary Entries Near tar sand
Cite this Entry
“Tar sand.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tar%20sand. Accessed 19 Jun. 2024.
Kids Definition
tar sand
noun
: sand or sandstone that is naturally soaked with heavy sticky portions of petroleum
More from Merriam-Webster on tar sand
Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about tar sand
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