Ontario (Canada) is supporting the creation of a new mining and exploration data centre through an investment of C$750,000 from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp (NOHFC). Through this support, the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI) is establishing a Mining Observatory Data Control Centre (MODCC) in the SNOLAB surface building located at the Vale Creighton mine near Sudbury, Ontario. The new facility will help mining companies collect, filter and analyse mining and exploration data. This research collaboration will accelerate mining discoveries and enable the mining of deeper deposits.
“CEMI continues to help the mines and minerals industry turn innovative ideas into reality,” stated Sudbury MPP Rick Bartolucci. “This funding will strengthen Greater Sudbury’s standing as an international hub of research and innovation in mining.”
“This centre will harvest the secrets hidden in large amounts of exploration and mining data, gleaning insights to improve exploration success and will result in better decisions that improve both daily and long-term profitability,” stated Doug Morrison, President and CEO CEMI. “Capitalising on the experience and expertise of both CEMI and SNOLAB, this proposal will increase the capacity and capability to service science and engineering communities in the North and around the world.”
“Our investment in this project is providing an opportunity for academia and industry to work together in the planning of new mining projects,” concluded Bartolucci. “The MODCC will better position our community as a knowledge and service leader in mineral industry and is sure to attract investments to Northern Ontario.
The MODCC project is scheduled to be completed by December 2015.
SNOLAB is Canada’s leading edge astroparticle physics research facility located 2 km underground in the Creighton mine. The project began in 1990 as the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), designed to solve the Solar Neutrino Problem which was the apparent discrepancy that the number of neutrinos observed emanating from the Sun was between one third and one half of what theory predicted. In a series of measurements published between 2001 and 2006, SNO conclusively proved that the solar neutrino deficit was caused by a property of the neutrino by which it changed “flavour” from the type produced by the Sun (electron neutrinos) to other types (predominantly muon neutrinos). With the successful completion of its experimental program, the SNO experiment ended data taking in 2006 and decommissioned in 2007. The enormous success of the SNO experiment proved the value of deep underground physics laboratories and the SNO measurement has led to more questions about the nature of neutrinos and the composition of the Universe that can only be answered in experiments sited underground.
In 2002, Carleton University, Laurentian University, Queen’s University, University of British Columbia, University of Guelph and University de Montreal (five of these universities were part of the SNO experiment) put forward a proposal to the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) for the creation of a new international facility dubbed SNOLAB. As an expansion of the existing SNO underground facility, SNOLAB would be able to house several experiments simultaneously. This is a significant improvement over the existing facility which only had space for the SNO experiment. In June 2002, CFI announced funding for SNOLAB. With additional funds from the province of Ontario, SNOLAB is approximately three times larger than the original SNO facility and is designed to provide space for the next generation of astroparticle physics experiments that require deep underground sites to shield from the backgrounds caused by cosmic rays. These new experiments will explore the properties of neutrinos, expand our understanding of the energy production mechanisms in the Sun and search for Cosmic Dark Matter – the so called “missing mass” in the Universe. The construction for SNOLAB began in 2004 with a new surface facility coming on line in 2005 and the expanded underground laboratory expected to be occupied in mid 2008.
