Sudbury is not ugly, as the old ‘moonscape’ slur has it, nor is it beautiful, as its boosters claim, pointing to the city’s many lakes. At once awesome and terrible, harsh and majestic, Sudbury lies beyond the register of ugly and beautiful. The place can only be described as sublime, for Sudbury is a phenomenon as much as it is a city. This is revealed by the fundamental confusion about its name, which never makes clear what is nominated: the city itself, the larger region, the Sudbury Basin on which the city is perched, the fact of the mines, or even the reputation of the place. Without proper limits, one signifier encompasses all of these identities. Sudbury is, in the final analysis, the slow unfolding of a cosmic accident.The nickel ore that fuelled the city’s development was deposited in a vast cataclysm, the impact of a meteorite that would have destroyed all life on earth – had there been any. But this occurred so long ago that life did not yet exist on earth. 1 The shock was so great that seismologists can still detect its faint reverberation – planet Earth literally quivers with the pangs of Sudbury’s birth. The impact also resonates metaphorically in uncanny returns that recall the traumatic genesis of the place. The most obvious example is the way the mining of Sudbury’s extraterrestrial gift denuded a vast area of land. The ring of blasted and blackened rock seems to reiterate the original collision’s destructive effects. Likewise, the open-pit mines, once used where the ore breached the surface but now long obsolete, seem to parody the original crater. And for decades, people stopped their cars along the highway for the nightly spectacle of molten slag pouring down a growing heap, as if watching a son et lumière show explaining how we got here. The city and its fortunes, fair and foul, can be properly understood only by the measure of the awesome, the terrible and the undeniably grand. Sudbury, however, did not achieve greatness; it had greatness thrust upon it immemorially, and now struggles with the fear of it. When the city formally changed its name in 2001 to the awkward (and widely unpopular) City of Greater Sudbury/La Ville du Grand Sudbury, it was to officially acknowledge the amalgamation of the regional municipality, but symbolically, it declares something known to all who live here and immediately apparent to those who visit: Sudbury is no ordinary town. An account of Sudbury is almost obliged to begin with its ancient origins, and some remarkable facts and figures. Geologists now generally agree that the Sudbury Basin was formed 1.85 billion years ago by the impact of a meteorite ten to sixteen kilometres in diameter. The original crater was circular and about 240 kilometres wide. Material ejected by the collision spread in what must have been a global firestorm; in 2007, a large patch of Sudbury detritus 7.6 metres thick was discovered in Minnesota, at a distance of some 1,100 kilometres. 2,3 The force of the collision is incalculable. It left circular fractures called shatter cones that can still be seen in the rock and caused changes even at the molecular level, forming microdiamonds and trapping rare elements in the rock. The Precambrian Shield was punctured so deeply– to a depth of at least fifteen kilometres –that no one yet knows whether the nickel found in Sudbury was present in the meteorite or whether it was splashed up from the molten bowels of the earth. In either case, the impact formed bodies of ore in a ring that resembles the milk-drop coronet photographed by Harold Edgerton, but at a vast scale and embedded in solid rock. This geological structure is called the Nickel Irruptive, and is the world’s largest deposit of nickel sulphide ore.
The time frame of this event is so immense as to be incomprehensible.When it occurred, the single earthly continent had not yet divided; the planet did not have an atmosphere as such; plants did not yet exist; Minnesota was not Minnesota. The infinitesimal movement of tectonic plates over eons squished the original circle into an ellipse, and erosion reduced the crater to a shallow basin 60 kilometres long and 27 kilometres wide. The last glaciers scoured the crater and then filled it with a shallow lake that eventually disappeared. The clayish area inside the basin, known locally as The Valley, is now mostly farmland, and around the irruptive, which is sometimes called The Rim, the mines are strung in a loop. The valley renders plainly visible the disturbance that lies far below the ground, and, as a small patch of agricultural land within the stony uniformity of the Canadian Shield, it has the almost mythic quality of those lost valleys in science-fiction tales where time stands still and a fragment of a prior world is preserved. To crest the rim of the irruptive and descend to the flat plain of the valley can produce a strange thrill, as if one were riding the infinitely slow roller coaster of prehistory. The catastrophic destruction of the natural environment is the other inescapable fact of this place, and it is the part for which we are responsible. Until the beginning of a remarkably successful program of landscape remediation in the early 1970s, the city of Sudbury was surrounded by a zone at least twenty kilometres in diameter that was denuded of vegetation, badly eroded and stained black by the sulphuric acid released by the smelting of nickel ore. 4 Biological processes broke down so completely that there were no insects or fungi to help rot the few remaining tree stumps. At the centre of this forbidding zone, there was, and still is, an extensive and growing heap of slag and large ponds of fine tailings. This eerie landscape had the aspect of a biblical tel olam – a desert or damned place. In the early seventies, the trip into the city entailed passing through a weird landscape of black rock interspersed with alluvial plains of tailings stained bright red with nickel waste and traversed by brilliant cupric-blue streams lined with banks of yellow sulphur crystals. It was like commuting on some other planet. Much of the environmental damage was done by open-bed roasting, a practice that seems almost unbelievable now that it is obsolete. 5 The pentlandite or iron-nickel sulphide ores found in Sudbury contain as much as 25 percent sulphur, and this level must be reduced as the first step in smelting. From the beginning of smelting in 1888 until new practices were adopted in 1929, at least eleven roast yards with a total of up to sixty-five beds were used in the initial processing of the ore. The primitive procedure consisted essentially of building a wood pyre the size of a city block and up to a couple of metres tall. Pulverised ore was piled on top and the whole mass ignited. The roasting lasted from thirty-five to forty days for an 800-1,000-ton heap, and could run well beyond a hundred days for a heap of 2,500 tons. The wood was simply tinder to ignite the ore itself. The success of the procedure relied on the fact that the ore found in Sudbury is chemically ‘hot’ and can ignite at a relatively low temperature.This process, however, had the effect of releasing sulphur dioxide directly into the air, where it combined with atmospheric water to make sulphuric acid.The four decades from 1890 to 1930 saw an estimated 11.2 million tons of sulphur released into the immediate environment at ground level.Although the enclosed smelting process that was later implemented was less dramatic, it released even more sulphur into the air until the fumes began to be regulated in the early 1960s.
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