Sudbury and the Mysteries of the Universe

Sudbury, the nickel capital of the world, is a city deeply connected to the wonders of the cosmos. Over 1.8 billion years ago, an enormous impact set a series of events in motion — and the end involves a mysterious, “dark” experiment deep underground.

We can't thank SNOLAB, the Creighton Mine, and Blaire (our incredible guide) enough for the once-in-a-lifetime adventure that was touring and filming in SNOLAB. We will never forget it for the rest of our lives. We hope we could do some semblance of justice (with our independent, low-budget filmmaking pedigree) to what we consider the brightest beacon of Canada's scientific community. If you come away from this episode with something, we hope it's interest in what's going on at SNOLAB. We've stepped out of our comfort zone a little on this one, so there are many important addendums to this episode below. We barely touched on what dark matter is, so if you're scratching your head, please watch this awesome video by Kurzgesagt: https://goo.gl/aPkxQD

Red flag: when we say dark matter makes up 85% of the "stuff" in the universe, we mean matter—85% of matter is dark matter. Universally-speaking, the universe is made up of approximately 70% dark energy, 25% dark matter, and 5% regular matter. We apologize for wording it in such a confusing and vague way—just remember we are focusing on the physical "stuff" that makes up 30% of the universe and aren't including (dark) energy.

Now for the comet. If you are interested in astronomy you probably already know this, but there's a debate as to what exactly impacted with the Earth 1.8 billion years ago: a comet or an asteroid. In both cases, once the cosmic entity hit the Earth, it immediately became a "meteorite" by definition. The reason we stick with comet is because in the past ten years it has become the most popularly-accepted theory, making the rounds from scientific journals to press releases. Here are some of our sources: The Scientific Journal, Terra Nova, included a 2014 study that came to the conclusion it was a comet: https://goo.gl/CNJbTM The Scientific American popularized the notion: https://goo.gl/KXKNFL The study itself produced follow-ups, including a study focused on the ramifications of the comet's impact, published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta: https://goo.gl/gfXaFf Basically, things that happened 1.8 billion years ago are never set-in-stone—a comet vapourizing to produce a meteorite strike just seems like the most plausible explanation for the Sudbury Basin at the moment. In a similar vein, our depiction of the Earth's surface 1.8 billion years ago is based entirely on contemporary theoretical models, and is most likely inaccurate.

Essentially there was a supercontinent, Nena, and a couple other subcontinents, Ur and Atlantica. At some point (around 1.5 billion years ago) they, as well as other landmasses, amalgamated to form the supercontinent Nuna. The timeline of all of this, the exact geography, and orientation, is all theoretical, so we tried our best to emulate what we saw in our research. Here is a theoretical computer model on the timeline we cover: https://goo.gl/HCHfGB There's another area where lines had to be blurred: the uses of nickel. Nothing is ever built entirely out of nickel, not even five cent coins. When we refer to artillery, inventions and car batteries, nickel is a major component of the objects. Usually it's use is centered around being an alloy, used in conjunction with iron to produce steel. That doesn't mean it was any less important—without the nickel from Sudbury most of the things we brought up wouldn't exist or wouldn't have been made in such high volumes. Nickel from Sudbury was, and continues to be, a major commodity in the world's markets. Copper was/is also plentiful in Sudbury, but the amount of nickel dwarfs it. Sudbury is no longer the wasteland it once was. We don't touch on it enough in the episode but we will in social media posts and follow-ups.

Sudbury has actually become a beacon of environmental revitalization and we were stunned by it when we filmed there. There are conflicting reports about the rock formations at Onaping Falls—signs on-site say they are shatter cones, someone from Science North directed us that they are, but a commenter has said they were formed from dynamite blasts and shatter cones are much more subtle. Go to the Laughing Buddha restaurant if you visit Sudbury. What would an episode about Sudbury be if we didn't include Stompin' Tom (listen for the Inco line): https://goo.gl/3Nhp2F

Episode Transcript:

This is the Big Nickel in Sudbury. It is one of the most beloved landmarks in the country.

People from all over Canada come here to take selfies with this giant coin. It's been here for more than fifty years, a tribute to the city's history as one of the world's big mining towns. The land beneath Sudbury is home to the richest nickel deposit on the planet. More than five hundred billion dollars worth of nickel and other metals has already been dug out of the ground.

But how did that metal get there in the first place? Why is Sudbury the nickel capital of the world? Well, to understand what's in the ground down here, you have to go up there - all the way up there. Into outer space.

This is Canadiana.

1.8 billion years ago, when the Earth was a very different place, the land was a barren, lifeless expanse. The only living beings are in the ocean: microscopic, single-celled organisms. But it's on this strange, unfamiliar planet that the story of Sudbury, Ontario begins, because something is coming.

This is a comet, and it's come a very long way, from the far reaches of the solar system, on an orbit that might take it trillions of kilometers into outer space before turning back towards the Sun. It's ten to fifteen kilometers across. It's traveling 36,000 kilometers an hour, and it's headed straight to the Earth. When the comet hit the planet as a meteorite, the impact was enormous. The cloud of debris probably stretched around the entire world. The crater left behind was two hundred kilometers long, three times as big as the one made by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. This is the edge of it.

Here at High Falls, the Onaping River tumbles fifty-five meters down the rim of the ancient crater, and even today, after nearly two billion years of erosion, what's left of the Sudbury basin is still the second biggest impact crater found anywhere on Earth. And you can find evidence of the meteorite in rocks like this too. These lines were formed by the shockwave from the impact, a cataclysmic moment in time frozen in stone.

The impact was so powerful it melted rock into magma. Some scientists think it might have even broken through the Earth's crust. That magma was filled with minerals like nickel. They cooled in the bottom of the gigantic crater, cooled off, and then waited down there for a very, very, very long time.

Welcome to the late 1800s.

Canada has just officially become a country, and it's been united by a brand new railroad. The Canadian-Pacific railway is being built all the way west to British Columbia, as one of the important promises to the federation. The new railroad reached Sudbury in 1883, and it was right here while they were blasting away at the stone to clear a route for the tracks, that a blacksmith noticed a patch of rust-coloured rock.

He'd just stumbled across the largest nickel deposit in the world.

Indigenous people who had been mining the land around Sudbury to make tools and jewelry for at least ten thousand years.

But the blacksmith's discovery would change this place forever. The first big modern mines soon opened, and the settlers began to flood in, traveling up the new railroad to stake their claims. As the century came to a close, progress was speeding up, and with new technologies being invented all the time, nickel was being used for far more than just five cent coins. Even Thomas Edison made the trip north to try his hand as a prospector He wanted nickel for one of his new inventions: a car battery he was working on with Henry Ford.

Before long, Sudbury was one of the biggest nickel producers in the world. Just one Sudbury mine produced enough nickel to make almost half the Allied artillery used during the war. The city was transformed. Trees disappeared, replaced by smokestacks and chimneys. This one, the Superstack, is the second tallest chimney in the world. The second tallest thing anyone has ever built anywhere in Canada, next only to the CN tower. It was built so tall to prevent noxious gases from settling into the crater.

The mines had become so productive, that the air pollution had literally blackened the earth. A hundred and fifty years after that first mine opened, and two billion years after the meteorite hit, Sudbury is still a city of mines. There are so many tunnels beneath my feet right now that if you put them end to end, they'd stretch nearly all the way across Canada.

They go deep, too, and this one is the deepest of them all. We're now more than two kilometers beneath the surface of the Earth. We're in the Creighton mine, which is still in operation more than a hundred years after they first started digging. But this part of the mine isn't what it seems. There's something very unusual going on down here, and it's connected to a cosmic mystery.

This is SNOLAB. It's one of the most advanced physics laboratories in the world. It was built all the way down here in a specially excavated section of the mine, so the rock would shield it from cosmic radiation. To get in here you need to take a thorough shower, and wear these special clothes, all to make sure you don't accidentally contaminate one of the lab's sensitive experiments. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, SNO, the predecessor of SNOLAB, was originally built to detect neutrinos, an experiment that won the Nobel Prize. And today the facility is still used for lots of research projects, including one of the great scientific quests of our time.

This tank contains a giant ball. It's one of the most important scientific instruments in the world. It's at the center of the search for dark matter, the mysterious substance that seems to make up 85% of all the stuff in the entire universe, even though we've never directly detected any of it. The ball contains argon, a stable noble gas.

Scientists hope that one day, after years and years of waiting, they'll get incredibly lucky, and a particle of dark matter will collide with the nucleus of an atom inside this ball, deep below Sudbury, and produce a tiny flash of light. The faint but spectacular ember that will prove dark matter really does exist, and answer one of our grandest questions. So Sudbury isn't just an ordinary mining town.

This mining town is deeply connected to the dark reaches of outer space, thanks to the comet that crashed into this place nearly two billion years ago, Sudbury has become the perfect spot to stare back up at the sky from where it came, and learn more about the vast mysteries of the universe

Remember how in the episode we were talking about Thomas Edison? Well this building behind me is the Edison building, which was named after the inventor even though he only spent a couple years in Sudbury. I'll tell you why in a moment, but first I want to thank you so much for watching. If you'd like to see more incredible stories from the history of Canada, you can click Subscribe and we have plenty more stories to tell. But to do it we will need your help. You can become a patron on Patreon, or give us a one-time donation on PayPal. Every little bit helps; it means the world to us. You can also follow us on social media: @thisiscanadiana.

And now, back to Thomas Edison. As we said, he came to Sudbury looking for nickel to use in his inventions, and he found it. In fact he found it not far from where I'm standing right now, just over there. And it was an incredibly rich find. But every time he sunk a new shaft, he ran into a layer of quicksand, and after a couple of years he got sick of spending money on it and decided to head home to the United States, leaving it to others to profit, which they did, enormously. A new company was founded and it was named after this part of Sudbury: it was called Falconbridge. And before long it was one of the biggest companies in Canada, and they needed a new headquarters.

So in the 1960s this building was built, and they named it the Edison building in honor of the man who had found the vein that made them all rich. And I mean, like, incredibly rich. By the early 2000s, Falconbridge was pulling in nearly seven billion dollars US in profits every year. But then, they got bought out by a Swiss company, and these headquarters were no longer needed. So they were given to the city of Sudbury, and today they've been transformed into the city's archives. And this building with a unique tie to Sudbury's past, is where that past is kept protected and preserved for future generations.

I'm Adam Bunch, and we'll see you next time on Canadiana.