News & Events

Meg Freer is an established Kingston writer and the McDonald Institute’s Poet in Residence. She is developing a chapbook of verse dedicated to astroparticle physics planned for Spring 2025. She recently had an opportunity to once again visit the SNOLAB site, 30 years after her initial visit to the then-in-progress Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Her edited field notes of the experience follow, below:

 

“As part of my poet-in-residence position with the McDonald Institute, I went to Sudbury to spend the morning of November 1st visiting SNOLAB, taking notes and photos and talking to people to get ideas for more poems to add to my project. I appreciate this unusual privilege of visiting as a non-scientist, but even more unusual is that it was my second trip down into the Vale Creighton Mine. In September 1994, I was a guest of the Queen’s University physicists invited to tour the lab then being built for the original SNO project.

 

In 1994, there was no modern building with well-designed change rooms and meeting rooms, and the neutrino detector would not be turned on until 1999. To ride in the mine cage down to the 6800 level and walk along the mine drift, then called the ‘SNO drift’, we wore blue coveralls over our clothes, plus tall rubber boots and utility belts with battery packs for headlamps attached to our hard hats. I don’t remember the elevator being crowded, so I assume we took a trip at a time other than for a regular mine shift. Most of the facility was still under construction to become a clean room space. Once we got to the lab area and passed through a narrow hallway and into the air shower, we entered what would become the Class 100 detector cavity. The beautiful acrylic geodesic vessel was in place but still being assembled and wouldn’t be filled with water for a few more years.
Now, 30 years later, there are many new safety and security protocols to follow from the time you arrive at the SNOLAB building. The advance preparation and organization on the part of SNOLAB staff make the necessarily complicated procedures run smoothly and efficiently, and the safety and security policies help to put visitors at ease. I received in advance several pages of instructions of what to wear, what to bring/not bring, and what to expect. Visitors put on yellow coveralls rather than the orange ones worn by the miners and SNOLAB staff. A full set of mine gear to walk down the drift now includes heavy work boots, the utility belt, mining helmet with ear protectors and LED headlamp, safety glasses, work gloves, and an SCSR (self-contained self-rescue device), a portable breathing apparatus weighing about 2 kg with an oxygen source in case, for example, oxygen levels become low underground or there is carbon monoxide present. My tour guide and I went down in the mine cage with a regular shift of miners going down around 7:30 a.m., so there were about 45 of us squeezed into the elevator. The rail cars that the miners board at the bottom are electric and quieter than the old ones, making it harder to hear them coming up behind you when you are walking down the drift. There is now a single string of LED lighting on the ceiling of the drift to provide some light in the dark tunnels. There are more storage and utility rooms off to the sides, including a new sewage treatment area. Once in the lab area, a shower (including washing hair) and complete change into clean gear (including a hairnet) is required. The air shower is in a different place and there is now a lunch room/kitchen as well as an in-house liquid nitrogen plant and water treatment facility. The original SNO detector cavity is occupied with a new experiment, so it was not possible to see it, but the new lab spaces take up the space of an enclosed shopping plaza. To visit every lab takes a lot of walking and all the time before the next mine cage up to the surface around 11:30 a.m. With an added 25-30% pressure on the body from being underground, it was tiring morning, but with my knowledgeable and personable guide, Blaire Flynn, it was time well spent.”

 

The McDonald Institute is honored to have Freer as our first poet -in-residence, and we look forward to sharing more of her work as it develops.