six books
The Sudbury Basin is a complex geological structure dating back millions of years, and where much of Greater Sudbury resides. Thirty-seven miles long and 17 miles wide, it produces most of the world's ores and precious metals. The floor of the basin contains some of the best agricultural land in Ontario. A plaque in Bell Park explains the significance of this geological site, and its role in the province's mining history.
Canadian Shield traces the geologic evolution of the Shield, its first tentative exploration by humans starting 11,000 years ago as the last great ice sheets withdrew, its changing economic fortunes as Europeans penetrated its remote rocky vastnesses for furs and metals, and its transformation in the twentieth century into a national icon to Canadians.
Ontario Rocks tells this fascinating 3 billion year long story of Ontario's geological evolution, from its beginnings as part of an early landmass called Arctica, its incorporation into enormous supercontinents, through to the repeated ice ages and abrupt climatic changes of the last few thousand years. Merging Canadian geology with global evolution, this highly illustrated survey also touches on the development of Ontario's mining and oil industries, and the commercial use of rocks as building material.
In this memoir Penny Petrone tells what it was like growing up in Northern Ontario as the daughter of parents who moved to Canada from the class-bound feudal society of Southern Italy during the first quarter of the century when America was the dream of millions of Europeans.
From Meteorite Impact to Constellation City is a historical geography of the City of Greater Sudbury. The story that began billions of years ago encompasses dramatic physical and human events.
A dead body is found on the side of Highway 17 outside Sudbury. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter day, all around the northern Ontario town and through the lives of eleven very different people.
Where else can that well-known phrase be better applied than to a study of the Finns in Sudbury? “Rock” defines the physical reality of the Sudbury setting: rugged hills, mines, farms and forests set in the Precambrian Shield. “Hard” defines the human setting: Finnish immigrants having to contend with the problems and stresses of relocating to a new culture, with livelihoods that required great endurance as well as a tolerance for hazardous conditions.
