Joël Lapointe spotted a meteorite crater candidate in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region while using Google Maps to plan a 2024 vacation route. He noticed unusual terrain centered on Lake Marsal, then reported it on Impact Earth as a possible impact site.
Gordon Osinski later visited the area in 2025 and provisionally identified the feature as a crater about 390 million years old and roughly 15 miles, or 25 kilometers, wide. The site has been named Uhackatik with approval from the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit, and the research will be presented in August at the 88th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Frankfurt, Germany.
Lapointe’s Google Maps find
Lapointe was not looking for a crater. He was planning a route for the 2024 vacation when the terrain around Lake Marsal stood out on the map, prompting him to file a report on Impact Earth. That report pushed the site into a scientific field visit rather than leaving it as an online curiosity.
The finding matters because impact structures of this age are hard to preserve. Around 400 million years of erosion and geologic change can erase the surface clues that usually give away an old impact, so a large surviving structure gives researchers a clearer target to study.
Osinski in Quebec
Osinski, a Western planetary geologist, visited the region in 2025 and said fieldwork showed “Shock metamorphic effects” in the rocks. He also said the expedition found impact melt rocks and shatter cones in rock layers, the kinds of features expected when rock has been altered by a high-energy impact.
He described the melt rocks this way: “impact melt rocks are like they sound: large volumes of rock that are melted by the impact event, but then cool and crystallize to look a lot like volcanic rocks,” and added, “Finding these preserved — as they are usually some of the first parts of a crater to be eroded — was a big surprise.”
Uhackatik and the record
The crater is provisionally identified, but the research has not yet been peer-reviewed. Osinski said the last discovery of that scale he knew of was the Hiawatha structure in Greenland in 2018, which he said is about 31 kilometers across and still has uncertainty around its origin because it is buried by ice.
For now, Uhackatik joins a short list of large ancient impact structures under active study. The practical next step is the August presentation in Frankfurt, where the team will lay out the field evidence and the size estimate that put this Quebec site on the map in the first place.
