About Sudbury

Greater Sudbury (2006 census population 157,857) is a city in Northern Ontario, Canada. Greater Sudbury was created in 2001 by amalgamating the cities and towns of the former Regional Municipality of Sudbury, along with several previously unincorporated geographic townships.

It is the largest city in Northern Ontario in population, and the 24^th largest metropolitan area in Canada. In land area, it is the largest city in Ontario, the seventh largest municipality in Canada and the largest municipality in English Canada legally designated as a city.

It is also the only city in Ontario which has two official names — its name in French is Grand-Sudbury. Unlike designations such as Greater Toronto or Greater Montreal, the name "Greater Sudbury" refers to a single city, not a conurbation of independent municipalities. However, the name Sudbury, without its official modifiers, is still the more common name for the city in everyday usage.

The city's Census Metropolitan Area consists of the city proper and the First Nations reserves of Whitefish Lake and Wahnapitae, and had a population of 158,258 in the 2006 census. Informally, some residents of the area may also consider the metropolitan area to include the towns of Markstay-Warren, St. Charles and French River, a region commonly known as Sudbury East.

During the Apollo manned lunar exploration program, NASA astronauts trained in Sudbury to become familiar with shatter cones, a rare rock formation connected with meteorite impacts. However, the popular misconception that they were visiting Sudbury because it purportedly resembled the lifeless surface of the moon dogged the city for years.

Sudbury is on the Canadian (Precambrian) Shield. With 330 lakes within its boundaries, Sudbury has more lakes than any other municipality in Canada. Among the most notable are Lake Wanapitei, the largest lake in the world completely contained within the boundaries of a single city, and Lake Ramsey, just a few kilometres south of downtown Sudbury, which held the same record before the municipal amalgamation in 2001 brought Lake Wanapitei fully inside the city limits.

Visitor attractions

Sudbury has lent its mining heritage to two major tourist attractions: Science North, an interactive science museum built atop an ancient earthquake fault on the shore of Lake Ramsey, and Dynamic Earth, an earth sciences exhibition which is also home to the Big Nickel, one of Sudbury's most famous landmarks. A mining heritage monument also overlooks the city's Bell Park.

Another city landmark, the Inco Superstack, is the tallest freestanding chimney in the Western hemisphere, and the second tallest structure in Canada after the CN Tower.

The city is also home to the Greater Sudbury Heritage Museums, a network of historical community museums.

In 2007, the city undertook a community project which saw the downtown Paris Street bridge retrofitted with 72 flagpoles, each of which will permanently display the flag of a world nation demographically represented among the population of Sudbury. In September of 2007, the bridge was officially renamed Bridge of Nations. Although its status has not yet been confirmed, organizers of the project submitted it to the Guinness Book of World Records for consideration as the world's longest span of flags on a bridge.

Science and technology

Sudbury was one of the first Canadian cities to plan and implement its own digital telecommunications strategy. Beginning in 1996, the city began constructing a fibre optic network which saw over 400 kilometres of cable laid down to serve the city's business and citizen populations. This has allowed the general public to enjoy broadband internet at higher speeds than many other cities. Traditionally, the highest speed on broadband available to the public is 6MBPS. Residents within the urban core can get resident broadband access at 16MBPS. In November 2005, the city was named one of the world's "Smart 21 Communities" by the Intelligent Community Forum, a worldwide project to honour technological innovation.

The Creighton Mine site in Sudbury is the site of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, the lowest background radiation particle detector in the world.

Sudbury hosted the International Physics Olympiad in 1997.

Rich History
Sudbury's modern history was set in the hard rock of the Canadian Shield when Prime Minister John A. MacDonald's vision of a transcontinental railroad carved its way westward and established the small settlement of Sudbury Junction in 1883.  While the area's dense forests of towering pine, birch and maple attracted thousands of loggers, in the long run, Sudbury would owe its prosperity and rapid growth to the rich minerals embedded in the Sudbury Basin.