A 390-million-year-old crater discovered on a satellite map.
In 2024 amateur astronomer Joël Lapointe was planning a camping trip in the Côte-Nord region, in the eastern part of the Canadian province of Quebec. While searching satellite maps online to find a suitable spot for his tent, he noticed a large circular structure near Lake Marsal. Lapointe suspected that the regular circular shape was actually an old crater from a meteorite impact. His discovery reached scientists, who decided to test the hypothesis in the field.
In October 2025 a team led by geologist Gordon Osinski of Canada's Western University went into the field. Osinski is one of the world's leading experts on impact craters and runs a large database of such structures. In the field the scientists found shatter cones, characteristic fractures in the rocks that form only under enormous pressure during an impact. Osinski explains that they are the only unequivocal evidence of an impact that can be seen in the field with the naked eye. The team also identified the central uplift, typical of large craters, as well as rocks with a columnar structure. In an impact of such force rocks from deep below rise upwards and form a hill in the middle of the crater.
The crater measures about 25 kilometres across, and its age is estimated at about 390 million years. This means that the meteorite struck the Earth in the Devonian period, when life was developing mainly in the seas, while on land the first forests were only just appearing. This is the eleventh confirmed impact structure in Quebec, while only about 200 such structures are known on the entire Earth. It is also the largest newly discovered crater since 2018, when the 31-kilometre-wide Hiawatha crater was found under the Greenland ice. In the same region also lies the famous crater Manicouagan, about 100 kilometres wide, one of the largest on Earth.
Craters on Earth are much harder to spot than on the Moon, because erosion, water, ice and vegetation erase their traces over millions of years. In addition, this area is sparsely populated and covered with dense forests, so the structure remained unnoticed for a long time.
The crater was given the name Uhackatik after consultations with the council of the Innu community of Ekuanitshit. The Innu are an Indigenous people who have lived in the east of Canada for thousands of years.
The discovery gained worldwide attention on 15 September 2026, when NASA published the satellite image of the crater as its Image of the Day. The image was taken on 12 October 2025 by the American satellite Landsat 8, in the same month when Osinski's team was also in the field. In it the circular shape that Lapointe had noticed on the maps online can be seen clearly from space.
The story of Uhackatik shows that even in the 21st century the Earth hides undiscovered secrets. Today anyone with access to the internet can browse satellite images of the whole world, and sometimes curious amateurs are actually the first to notice the things that professionals have missed.