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Amateur astronomer Joël Lapointe was perusing Google Maps, plotting hiking routes for a camping trip, when he noticed something strange on the terrain. It looked to be a large indentation spanning 15.5 miles across and forming a ring in northeastern Canada. To his eye, it seemed like a meteorite crater.
“I told myself, ‘You haven’t discovered anything, Joël, it’s not possible, they must already know about this,’” Lapointe tells the Canadian Press’ Marieke Glorieux-Stryckman. But the pit wasn’t in any of the crater databases Lapointe searched through, so he sent his hunch to experts.
Now, researchers have confirmed the existence of a large impact crater in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, as reported by Rachel Watts of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). After visiting the location in person, geologists have revealed that a meteor indeed smacked into this landscape around 390 million years ago.
The key evidence came once Lapointe’s theory reached Gordon Osinski, a planetary geologist at Canada’s Western University.
Osinski—who manages the university’s Impact Earth website, which hosts a database of craters—was initially doubtful about the discovery. But in October 2025, he nonetheless co-led an expedition to the potential impact site to investigate the situation. There, the team had to overcome an unwelcoming landscape.
“This was one of the most arduous expeditions I’ve ever done—and I’ve done 25 expeditions to the Arctic and six continents,” Osinski tells Live Science’s Pandora Dewan. “The terrain was incredibly rough and rugged, plus [there were] lots of bugs.”
But the scientists found more than just bugs. On day two of the mission, they identified shatter cones—cone-shaped patterns, caused as shock waves travel through rock, that are angled toward the point of impact. They also discovered large areas of impact melt rock, which is produced from the intense pressure and temperature of an asteroid or meteorite strike.
In his work with Impact Earth, Osinski often gets reports of supposed craters that ultimately turn out to be false alarms. But this one proved to be a rare, accurate case. “It just goes to show, while 9 out of 10 or 99 out of 100 might not be [impact craters], there could always still be that one that will surprise you,” Osinski tells the CBC. “This is the first for me.”
The discovery, he adds, is likely among the biggest craters found in recent memory. Only about 200 meteorite craters have been identified around the world, and Osinski tells the Canadian Press that just one or two are discovered each year.
In August, the team will present their discovery at the 88th Annual Meteoritical Society Meeting in Germany. Following conversations with the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit, the governing body representing the area’s Indigenous people, the crater was named Uhackatik.
It’s the latest addition to Canada’s long list of confirmed impact craters—the nation has more known meteorite craters than any other country, though its world record doesn’t mean that Canada is targeted by space rocks more than other places. The distinction, instead, is representative of the area’s very old and stable bedrock, which has maintained the landscape long enough for humans to witness its history.
For his part, Lapointe seems ecstatic about the role he has played in the crater’s revelation. “It’s not every day that an ordinary citizen finds a 390-million-year-old crater,” he tells Radio-Canada. “I encourage everyone to not ignore intuition or an observation, even if it isn’t part of your field of expertise.”
This article was originally published on Smithsonian Magazine. Read the full story here: An Amateur Astronomer Using Google Maps Spotted a Strange Indentation. It Turned Out to Be a Meteorite Crater From 390 Million Years Ago © 2026 Smithsonian Institution.
