Qualla: Kidd Mine

Kidd Mine: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two billion years ago, water seeped into fractures in the rock beneath what is now northern Ontario and stopped moving. It sat there through the assembly and breakup of supercontinents, through ice ages and mass extinctions, through the entire evolution of complex life on Earth. In 2016, researchers at the Kidd Mine north of Timmins announced they had found this water still flowing from fissures nearly three kilometers underground -- the oldest known water on the planet. The mine that made the discovery possible is itself a record-holder: at 3,014 meters below the surface, Kidd Mine is the deepest base metal mine in the world, and the bottom of its No. 4 shaft sits 2,733 meters below sea level, making it the deepest accessible non-marine point on Earth. What began as a copper-zinc prospect discovered by an aerial survey in 1959 became one of the most scientifically significant holes humanity has ever dug.

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kidd Mine: The Anomaly at Kidd-55

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. In March 1959, an aerial geophysical survey conducted by Texas Gulf Sulphur Company detected an electromagnetic anomaly in a segment of the Abitibi greenstone belt designated Kidd-55. Ground investigation did not begin until October 1963, when an electromagnetic survey confirmed ...

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kidd Mine: The Scandal That Changed Wall Street

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. What happened next at Kidd-55 changed not geology but finance. Between the initial discovery and the formal announcement on April 16, 1964, officers of Texas Gulf Sulphur quietly bought company stock and stock options, knowing full well what the drill cores meant. The ore body wa...

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kidd Mine: Descending Into Deep Time

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. The mine began ore production in 1966 as an open pit and gradually transitioned underground. Ownership changed hands repeatedly: Texas Gulf Sulphur to Canada Development Corporation in 1981, to Falconbridge in 1986, to Xstrata in 2006, and finally to Glencore when it merged with ...

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kidd Mine: Water Older Than Memory

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. The discovery that captured global attention had nothing to do with metals. In 2013, researchers from the University of Toronto published a paper in the journal Nature reporting that water flowing from rock fractures deep in the mine was 1.5 billion years old. In 2016, they found...

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0