[4] The Sudbury basin formed as a result of an impact into the Nuna supercontinent from a large impactor body approximately 10–15 km (6.2–9.3 mi) in diameter that occurred 1.849 billion years ago[2] in the Paleoproterozoic era.

[citation needed] The Whitewater Group consists of a suevite and sedimentary package composed of the Onaping (fallback breccias), Onwatin, and Chelmsford Formations in stratigraphic succession.

Reports published in the late 1960s described geological features that were said to be distinctive of meteorite impact, including shatter cones[13] and shock-deformed quartz crystals in the underlying rock.

[citation needed] In 2014, analysis of the concentration and distribution of siderophile elements as well as the size of the area where the impact melted the rock indicated that a comet rather than an asteroid most likely caused the crater.

[15][16] The Sudbury Basin is located near a number of other geological structures, including the Temagami Magnetic Anomaly, the Lake Wanapitei impact crater, the western end of the Ottawa-Bonnechere Graben, the Grenville Front Tectonic Zone and the eastern end of the Great Lakes Tectonic Zone, but the structures are not directly related to one another in the sense of resulting from the same geological processes.

[citation needed] The large impact crater filled with magma containing nickel, copper, palladium, gold, the platinum group and other metals.

[20] In 1856 while surveying a baseline westward from Lake Nipissing, provincial land surveyor Albert Salter located magnetic abnormalities in the area that were strongly suggestive of mineral deposits, especially near what later became the Creighton Mine.

[21] The Vermillion Mine, which was the first in the Basin to be exploited, was the site at which Frank Sperry (a chemist of the Canadian Copper Company) made the first identification in 1889 of the arsenide of platinum which bears his name.

[23] As a result of the 1917 Royal Ontario Nickel Commission, which was chaired by Englishman George Thomas Holloway, the legislative structure of the prospecting trade was significantly altered.

[25] As a result of these metal deposits, the Sudbury area is one of the world's major mining communities, and has fathered Vale Inco and Falconbridge Xstrata.