Plain answers to things people actually wonder about this province. Each one is written here rather than generated, and every claim links to where it came from — so you can check it, and so it stays right.

• Why does the Alberta sky do that?

  Cold air fills the sky with ice crystals, and ice bends and bounces sunlight in ways that are entirely predictable once you know which crystals are up there. Flat plates lying level make sundogs. Tumbling columns make the ring. Mirror-flat faces make pillars. The difference between the displays is the shape of the ice and the way it falls.

  7 sources

• What is a quonset?

  The half-cylinder steel building in the farmyard. It is a United States Navy design from 1941, named after Quonset Point in Rhode Island where it was drawn up, and derived from a British hut of the First World War. On the prairies the name long ago stopped being a brand and became the ordinary word for any arched farm building.

  4 sources

• What exactly is a chinook?

  A warm, dry wind that arrives in southern Alberta down the eastern slope of the Rockies. Two things make it warm: it is mild Pacific air shoving a mass of arctic air out of the way, and it heats further as it descends, by roughly 10°C for every kilometre it falls. Either way, a January afternoon in Pincher Creek can go from bitter to shirtsleeves.

  8 sources

• Why does Alberta have no provincial sales tax?

  Alberta is the only province in Canada without a general provincial sales tax, and Alberta's own law says so in its opening lines. The province did try one, in 1936 — it lasted about sixteen months. Oil revenue made doing without it possible, and a 1995 statute now requires a referendum before any government can even introduce a bill bringing one back.

  6 sources

• Why does Alberta have no rats?

  Because the province decided to stop them at the border in 1950 and has kept doing it ever since. Alberta maintains a rat control zone along the Saskatchewan boundary — 600 kilometres long and 29 wide. Rat-free does not mean no rat ever arrives; it means none is allowed to settle.

  2 sources

More of these are coming. If there is something about Alberta you have always half-known and never actually checked, tell us on the contact page — the ones we can source properly get written.