Sudbury’s oddities are also manifest at a regional level. A unique spatial macro-form developed out of the crater’s shape and size. Instead of the concentric pattern that many cities assume, Sudbury acquired a series of satellite settlements located at or near the site of bodies of ore on the Nickel Irruptive. This elliptical ring of towns relies on Sudbury for social services and entertainment, but instead of turning to the city’s centre in a more typical North American pattern, many workers move outward from dormitory communities built just inside the valley, to the mine sites. Sudbury proper is not in a physical sense the centre of this system as it too is located on the peripheral ring. This unusual structure, which has created a powerful dialectic between the city and the valley, has had numerous consequences for the social and even political order of the city. The outlying communities feel a stronger independence than is usual in suburbs, but to govern these towns effectively, Sudbury was first established as a regional municipality in 1973 and then in 2001 all of the towns were amalgamated into the City of Greater Sudbury. This political manoeuvre has by no means resolved the opposition between the two forces. It might seem that Sudbury dwells in the past, but that is not the case at all. Northern Ontario is fundamentally modern, as seen in Thomas Alva Edison’s brief involvement in developing the mines, in the presence of Science North (which looks rather like a UFO or a lunar landing module) and most recently in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNOLAB), right. SNOLAB is one of the city’s many invisible presences. Although only a few hundred people have ever been inside, it holds a special place in the collective imagination of Sudburians. The curious inversion of an observatory located deep underground, mirrors the inversion of a detector for evanescent neutrinos located at the site of a massive meteorite’s impact. Sudbury abounds in signs and traces of its extraterrestrial origins, from the nickel itself, a metal commonly found on meteorites, to shatter cones produced in the rock by the force of the collision, to traces of the exotic fullerene. The Onaping Formation, a black tuff on the northern edge of the irruptive, was the first confirmed deposit of naturally occurring fullerene, a form of carbon discovered only in 1985. These carbon molecules, which feature sixty or seventy atoms arranged in a sphere, may have been present in that form on the meteorite or they may have been synthesised on impact; no one knows exactly how they were preserved for nearly two billion years. Even more recently, it has been discovered that these spherical molecules, like miniature icosahedral prisons, contain astral gases. Asteroids are known to sometimes contain amino acids, which has led some to speculate that collisions with asteroids may have seeded the earth with the chemicals necessary to initiate life or may even have brought life itself to earth. Later impacts caused death and destruction, but the Sudbury impact occurred near the time of the origins of life on earth. It makes perfect sense that the geodesic sphere of the SNOLAB, located deep in the earth, replicates the structure of fullerene, and that scientists search for minute cosmic particles in the aftermath of the immense meteorite that shaped Sudbury, for it is a place where telluric forces are felt with particular intensity, and where their connection to the astral plane is also evident. The heavens and the underworld seem to meet here, and the infernal patina on
the rock sometimes makes it look as if the darkness in the depths of the mines has crept out into broad daylight. Nickel was named after the devil himself, so it is not surprising the air in Sudbury still carries a whiff of brimstone. Surely it must have occurred to some watching the flow of molten slag that they were witnessing the biblical lake of fire, as if the landscape was not the result of our doing but a sign of some otherworldly wrath – retribution, no doubt, for our transgression against nature or the price of unloosing so many weapons on the world. Life in this northern town has an eschatological quality that is both immediate and impossibly remote, as if one lives at ground zero two billion years after Armageddon. In Sudbury, it may look like the end is near, but it feels familiar, like it’s been here before. –
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is an experimental physics laboratory located at the 6800 foot level of Creighton Mine, one of the oldest and deepest mines in Sudbury.The laboratory was inaugurated with the experiment seen under construction in this 1996 photograph by Steven Evans.The aptly named ‘SNOdome’ was a 12m diameter sphere made of acrylic and stainless steel. Designed and fabricated in California using aerospace industry techniques, it was shipped to Sudbury in pieces, transported underground, and reassembled. The giant vessel contained 1000 tonnes of heavy water (worth approximately a billion dollars) loaned by Atomic Energy Canada. Suspended in a 10-storey tall cavern flooded with conventional water and surrounded by a 17m diameter geodesic sphere bearing 9,456 photomultiplier tubes, the observatory relied on the deep mantle of solid rock to filter out random cosmic particles and reveal neutrinos alone.The experiment, which concluded in 2006, tracked about ten neutrinos a day, confirming the arrival of the expected number of neutrinos, but showed conclusively that they change in type after departing the sun. When the instrument was decomissioned, its materials were reused in some of the many subsequent large-scale and long-term experiments being conducted at the site.
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This essay originally appeared in Sudbury. Life in a Northern Town , published by Musagetes and Laurentian Architecture, 2011
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