Amateur finds 390-million-year meteorite crater in Quebec
A Quebec amateur astronomer spotted a huge pit on Google Maps that scientists have now confirmed as a roughly 390-million-year-old meteorite crater named Uhackatik. The feature sits in Côte-Nord around Lake Marsal and spans about 15 miles, with shatter cones and impact melt rock proving an ancient space-rock strike.
Key Takeaways
- Joël Lapointe noticed the circular pit while planning a 2024 camping trip on Google Maps.
- Western University geologist Gordon Osinski led a 2025 field trip that found classic impact evidence.
- The Uhackatik meteorite crater is about 15 miles (25 kilometers) wide and roughly 390 million years old.
- Findings will be presented at the Meteoritical Society meeting in August; research is not yet peer-reviewed.
The odd Québec discovery is the kind of story that fits right into our Bizarre News & Florida Man hub: an everyday map scroll that rewrote Earth history.
How was the meteorite crater found?
Amateur astronomer Joël Lapointe was plotting hiking routes for a camping vacation when he saw a large ring-shaped indentation in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region, centered on Lake Marsal. It looked, to his eye, like a scar left by a meteorite strike.
He checked crater databases, found nothing listed, and reported his hunch to Impact Earth, a crowdsourced crater site run with Western University in London, Ontario. Planetary geologist Gordon Osinski, who manages the database, was initially skeptical—most tip-offs turn out to be false alarms.
What proves this pit is a real impact?
Osinski co-led an October 2025 expedition into rough, bug-heavy terrain. On day two, the team found shatter cones—cone-shaped rock patterns formed when shock waves race through stone toward the impact point.
They also found preserved impact melt rocks, material melted by the strike then cooled into volcanic-looking stone. Those “shock metamorphic effects,” Space.com reports, left little doubt the structure is an impact crater.
After talks with the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit, on whose traditional lands the site sits, the crater was named Uhackatik. At roughly 15 miles (25 kilometers) across, Osinski has called it among the biggest crater finds of recent years.
Why does a 390-million-year-old crater matter?
Only about 200 meteorite craters are confirmed worldwide, and just one or two new ones turn up each year. Ancient examples are rare because erosion and geology erase the scars. Canada holds the most known impact sites thanks to old, stable bedrock—not because more space rocks hit there.
Osinski says the last discovery of similar scale may be Greenland’s ice-buried Hiawatha structure, spotted in 2018, though its size and origin remain debated. Uhackatik, by contrast, shows clear ground evidence. The team is still studying samples under microscopes and will present results at the 88th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Frankfurt in August.
“It’s not every day that an ordinary citizen finds a 390-million-year-old crater,” Lapointe told Radio-Canada, urging people not to ignore a sharp observation—even outside their expertise.