In 2024, a Google Maps User was planning a trip using the app; and what he found was a giant meteorite crater that…
Joël Lapointe was doing something entirely ordinary. The Canadian amateur astronomer had Google Maps open in 2024, scrolling through Quebec's Côte-Nord region to plan hiking routes for a camping trip. Somewhere north of Magpie, around Lake Marsal, the terrain stopped looking like terrain. It looked like a ring—a near-perfect circular scar pressed into the forest, roughly 25km across.
His first instinct was to talk himself out of it. Surely someone had already logged this. Lapointe went through the crater databases he knew of and came up empty, so he filed a report with Impact Earth, a crowdsourced crater registry run out of Western University in Ontario. Two years later, that hunch has a name.
The structure is now called Uhackatik, and geologists say a meteorite carved it out about 390 million years ago.Shatter cones and melt rock: how geologists confirmed the Quebec impact craterPlanetary geologist Gordon Osinski, who manages Impact Earth, was sceptical at first—most reports he receives turn out to be nothing.
He co-led an expedition to the site anyway in October 2025, and the terrain fought back. Osinski, who has done 25 Arctic expeditions across six continents, described it as among the toughest he has attempted, with brutal ground and relentless bugs.Day two settled it. The team found shatter cones, the branching fracture patterns that form when a shockwave rips through rock and point back towards the impact.
They also found large exposures of impact melt rock—stone liquefied by the strike, then recooled—which usually erodes away long before anyone gets to see it. Traces of zircon added to the case.Why Uhackatik is one of the biggest meteorite crater discoveries in yearsOnly about 200 impact craters have been confirmed worldwide, and one or two turn up annually, typically in the 5–10km range.
Uhackatik is several times that. Osinski reckons the last find of comparable scale was the Hiawatha structure spotted under Greenland's ice in 2018, whose size and origin remain disputed. This one isn't ambiguous.The 390-million-year date puts the impact well before dinosaurs existed—the earliest species appear around 230 million years ago.
The name came after consultation with the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit, on whose traditional lands it sits. Findings go to the Meteoritical Society's annual meeting in Frankfurt this month, ahead of peer review.Google Maps and Google Earth have cracked open discoveries beforeSatellite imagery has form here.
Egypt's remarkably intact Kamil Crater surfaced through a Google Earth search in 2008. That same year, palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger used it to pinpoint the South African cave system that yielded Australopithecus sediba.As Lapointe put it, ordinary citizens don't find 390-million-year-old craters every day.Get the latest technology news and updates.
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