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On the Trail of the Great Canadian Meteorites
Sudbury, Ontario
"The Big Nickel"
During the Pre-Cambrian Era, 1.85 BILLION years ago, an 8-12 km wide asteroid or comet hit what is now Sudbury. It punctured a huge hole 130 - 260 km across, deep into the earth’s crust and allowed an immense amount of material from the earth’s mantle to erupt out the hole. This created what is now the Sudbury Basin, an eroded oval feature within the surrounding Canadian Shield.
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In the 1880’s copper and nickel deposits were discovered in the Basin, a result of the deep metallic magma that filled the crater. Sudbury is now one of the most productive mining areas in the world and is in fact advertised as the “Nickel Capital of the World”.
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Sudbury’s impact crater is known as an astrobleme, the third largest in the world (the others being Vredefort crater in South Africa, and Chicxulub crater under the Yucatan Peninsula which lead to the demise of the dinosaurs).
Many Sudbury rocks show distinctive features of an impact (rather than a volcanic crater) such as shatter cones and shocked quartz features. Impact breccias are angular pieces of rocks fused together.
The impact must have created widespread damage, but at a time when only simple one-celled organisms existed.
All of Sudbury is in the crater basin
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Sudbury
Shatter Cone
Univ. of Alberta Meteorite Collection
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