Sudbury, Ontario January 17, 2012

We had a very busy day in Sudbury. It was a cold and cloudy winter day with a temperature of -6 °C but it felt like -11 °C with the wind chill. It was a good day for indoor activities.

We went to Dynamic Earth Science Center to check out the Vale Chasm exhibit. We were lowered many levels below the earth’s surface to show us what it’s like in the world of underground mining.

THE BIG NICKEL

We also went to The Big Nickel located outside of the Earth Science Center. It’s the biggest coin in the whole world, weighing 13, 000 kilograms and standing 9 meters high. The Big Nickel is a copy of the 1951 Canadian nickel. It was made in 1964 as a symbol of the all the wealth put into the Canadian economy from the production of nickel. I wanted to take it home with me so badly!

After lunch, we went to another Dynamic Earth show called the Xstrata Nickel Gallery: Rocks to Riches. Rocks to Riches shows how nickel and copper are processed. Milling crushes and grinds huge pieces of ore into fine powder using astonishing mechanical forces. Smeltering uses extreme heat to separate waste from the valuable metals. Finally, refining continues to purify the metals.

XSTRATA NICKEL

We learned so much about mining today. The Xstrata Nickel operations, located in the Sudbury Basin, is made up a mill, a smelter and two underground nickel-copper mines, the Nickel Rim South Mine and the Fraser Mine. They mostly produce nickel and copper but also cobalt, gold, silver, platinum and palladium.

Xstrata Nickel oversees the processing of the valuable metals. The Strathcona concentrator gets ore from the Sudbury mines and makes a nickel-copper concentrate that is sent to the Sudbury Smelter and a copper concentrate that is sent to Xstrata Copper for smelting and refining. At each stage the metal becomes more pure and more valuable. The Sudbury Smelter uses an electric furnace to smelt nickel copper concentrate into high-grade matte containing nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum metals. Next, the matte is transported to Quebec City and then shipped to Nikkelverk in Norway for refining into pure metals.

Vale Inco, also located in Sudbury, is one of the world’s leading nickel companies. It manufactures primary nickel used in stainless steel, alloy steels, nickel alloys and electroplating.

Much of the nickel produced is sold to the United States but also to many countries around the world. A lot of it is used to make stainless steel, which is a strong and flexible metal that is resistant to corrosion. We use it all the time in our day-to-day lives. Stainless steel is used to make elevators, buildings, skyscrapers, plumbing, high efficiency heating systems, glasses, cutlery, pots and pans, beer kegs, surgical instruments, medical implants, batteries for mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, airplanes, hybrid cars, subway cars and bars for roads and bridges.

SUDBURY BASIN

For our last adventure of the day we wanted to see Sudbury’s legendary landmark with our own eyes. About 1.8 billion years ago a meteorite crashed into Sudbury creating a humongous hole in the earth known today as the Sudbury Basin. The impact of the meteorite caused melted rock from below the earth’s crust to come up to the surface and fill the basin. Then a shock wave caused fissures and faults in the rocks that were filled up with precious metals from the melted rock. The Sudbury Basin is 15 kilometers deep and one of the biggest mines in the world. It was pretty amazing to see!