msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader) (03/29/86)
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