nickel

[Mark Brader]

Going off on a tangent to something in net.jokes, we find:

> > ....100% pure Canadian-mined nickel, mostly mined in Sudbury
> > (you know the one: the acid fumes from the smelters have devistated
> > the land around the town so badly that Apollo astronauts came here to
> > test the lunar rover, because the area so resembled the dead surface
> > of the moon).

Henry Spencer remarked:
> Yes, but for reasons having nothing to do with acid fumes. The Apollo
> astronauts trained at Sudbury because the Sudbury basin is strongly
> suspected to be a meteorite crater. The barrenness of the landscape was
> irrelevant, although this misunderstanding was so prevalent that the
> mayor of Sudbury (among others) took offense.

But he left out the interesting part. The nickel comes from the meteorite.
Something like 70-80% of the world's total supply of nickel comes from
this one meteorite! [I can't find where I read this, but I suspect that
it refers to the total of nickel that has been mined rather than reserves.]

Mark Brader