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The economic centre of northeastern Ontario, sprawling SUDBURY , some 165km north of Parry Sound , is parked on the edge of the Sudbury Basin, a pit created either by a volcano or, the preferred theory, by a giant meteor. Whatever did the damage, the effect was to throw one of the world's richest deposits of nickel and copper towards the surface. It was the nickel - used to temper steel - that made Sudbury's fortune, but its by-products caused devastation. Most of the damage was done by a smelting method known as heap roasting, used until the 1920s, which spread clouds of sulphurous fumes over forests already ravaged by lumber firms and mineral prospectors, who often started fires to reveal the traces of metal in the bare rocks. Likened to Hell or Hiroshima, the bleak landscape had only one advantage: in 1968 it enabled Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to practise their great leap for mankind in a ready-made lunar environment. Having continued to produce sulphur-laden smoke from the stacks of their nickel smelters, the mining companies were finally forced to take action when a whole community of workers from Happy Valley, just northeast of Sudbury, were evacuated in the 1970s because of the number of sulphur-induced illnesses. Since then, pollutants in the immediate environs have been reduced and the city's ambitious re-greening programme was even lauded at the UN's 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. As a result, thousands of acres have now spluttered back to life and the thirty lakes in the vicinity of Sudbury, including one in the middle of town, are no longer stagnant pools of vinegar. Sudbury's multinational population of 160,000 - over half of them French-speaking - are fiercely proud of their city, though it can seem that the main effect of the recent redevelopment has been an efflorescence of shopping malls. That said, the city can boast two of north Ontario's most impressive tourist sights, Science North and Big Nickel Mine
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