Why My Hometown Is So Famous
Sudbury, Ontario, is a small city of 160,000 people, but it's famous for big things. The Sudbury Basin is the second-largest meteor impact crater globally, estimated to occur 1.8 billion years ago. It's said to be 200 km wide originally, but now it's weathered and shrunk to 60 km long, 30km wide, and 15 km deep.
The Greater City of Sudbury
Sudbury is called the city of lakes because it has 330 lakes within the city limits, and Lake Wanapitei is the largest lake in the world within a city's limits.
The meteor or comet impact created a massive body of ore containing copper and nickel and gold, silver, cobalt, platinum, and many other minerals.
Our city has nine operating mines, two mills, two smelters, and a nickel refinery, making Sudbury the Nickel Capital of the world and known as the hard rock mining capital.
The world's largest five-cent coin, the Big Nickel, is situated at the Dynamic Earth center. And Science North is the second largest science center in Canada, and it has a unique stainless steel shape of a snowflake.
A Brief History of Sudbury Mining
In 1883 when the Trans-Canada railway was built, they discovered the ore body in Sudbury.
The first mining company, Canadian Copper, was founded in 1886 and began smelting operations in 1888. Even Thomas Edison came to explore the area in 1901.
During the early history of smelting, the ore was melted from the rock by burning trees. The result was an environmental disaster.
The surrounding trees were used as fuel, and the pollution killed all the vegetation in the area. Finally, the area looked like a moonscape. More on that later.
In 1928 and 1929, the Copper Cliff smelter constructed two chimneys to control the pollution but mainly to have enough up-draft for the furnace combustion.
The area remained an environmental disaster until 1970 when the Superstack was built. It was the tallest smokestack in the world at 1250 feet or 381 meters.
Then in 1971 and 1972, the Apollo 16 and 17 mission astronauts trained in Sudbury to recognize fissure cones (from the meteor blast). Sudbury was still a barren landscape.
However, in 1978 a land reclamation project started, and it was a world-famous success story. Sudbury is a world-class example of healing the environmental impact of mining.
Furthermore, since 2020 the big Superstack hasn't been used because of new ways to eliminate pollution. The famous Superstack is a landmark that may soon be dismantled.
Famous Visits To Sudbury
In 1923 Ernest Hemingway, the American novelist, visited Sudbury to investigate if a coal mine was found in the area of Chelmsford. Hemingway stayed at the Nickel Range Hotel while researching the story, but it turned out to be anthraxolite and not suitable for fuel.
On the eve of the Second World War, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth went underground at Frood Mine in June 1939. The queen was the first woman in Canada allowed to go down into a mine.
During the war, Sudbury mines were important for supplying 95 percent of Allied demands for nickel.
Because of the shortage of workers, women were allowed to work in the mines until the war was over. In 1975 women were finally allowed to work in the mining industry.
The Royal Family visits include Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on their visit to Canada in 1959. The Queen returned with Philip in 1984 to open Science North.
In October 1991, Prince Charles came to tour the environmental regreening project. Princess Diana and the future King of England, William, and his brother, Harry, visited Science North.
In 1987 Mount Everest mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary came to visit, and world-famous chimpanzee researcher Dr. Jane Goodall and numerous entertainers such as Celine Dion, Elton John, Bob Dylan, Michael Bublé, Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, Dire Straits, and Kiss.
The Famous Science News
In 1998 the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking visited Science North and opened the new SNOLAB, Sudbury's neutrino observatory, located two kilometers underground at Sudbury's Creighton Mine.
The SNOLAB used a large container of heavy water to study the puzzle of the missing neutrinos.
Stephen Hawking in the SNOLAB
In 2012 Stephen Hawking returned to the SNOLAB because of the neutrino experiments and the proof that neutrinos are not massless.
Sudbury's Laurentian University celebrated the Nobel Prize in physics because of the work done in the SNOLAB.
Dr. Arthur McDonald, who was in charge of the project, shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics with a professor in Japan.
The lab has been upgraded with $65 million for more research. Scientists are hunting for the existence of dark matter, particles that researchers theorize make up 60 to 80 percent of all matter in the universe. The famous news in Sudbury continues to this day.
From A Big Hole Into A Famous City
The Sudbury landscape has seen a lot of transformation.
The devastating meteor impact destroyed everything in Ontario and possibly the world. Next, mining the wealth in the basin devastated the landscape, and now the environment has been fully restored.
Sudbury started as a mining town and has grown from its past into today's famous city.
The Apollo astronauts trained for moon missions here, and the local company Norcat designed a drill for the Mars mission.
Norcat just opened the Norcat Underground Centre, an underground operating mine that serves as both an innovation and training center for the future in mining.
The SNOLAB is a world-class science facility and is currently searching for dark matter and related projects.
This brief article focuses on the science and related mining events that made a mining town into The Greater City of Sudbury.
Now the area is a multi-faceted city with Laurentian University and its Architecture school and Medical school.
The Health Sciences North Hospital has the latest equipment for research, including the Northeast Cancer Center.
Watch out world for greater things to come from our hole-in-the-ground.
I hope you learned why my city is famous, and it's not just because of the Big Nickel.
My wedding photo with the super stack in operation in the background
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