Athabasca River is marked by rapids, impeding navigation southwest of Fort McMurray. The Athabasca River travels before draining into the Peace-Athabasca Delta near Lake Athabasca south of Fort Chipewyan. From there, its waters flow north as Rivière des Rochers, then joining the Peace River to form the Slave River that empties into Great Slave Lake and discharges through the Mackenzie River system into the Arctic Ocean. The cumulative drainage area is . Numerous communities are located on the banks of the Athabasca River, including Jasper, Brule, Entrance, Hinton, Whitecourt, Fort Assiniboine, Smith, Athabasca, Fort McMurray, and Fort McKay. An independent study has
Oil sands sands and merge at Lake Athabasca to form the Slave River, which flows into the MacKenzie River, one of the largest rivers in the world. All of the water from these rivers flow into the Arctic Ocean. The Peace River oil sands probably contain over 30 billion cubic metres (200 billion barrels) of oil-in-place. The thickness of the deposit ranges from and it is buried about deep. Whereas the Athabasca oil sands lie close enough to the surface that the bitumen can be excavated in open-pit mines, the smaller Peace River deposits are too deep, and must be exploited using