How did an amateur astronomer discover an ancient crater?
In 2024 amateur astronomer Joël Lapointe was planning a camping trip in the province of Quebec, in the east of Canada. While searching for a good spot for his tent on satellite maps online, he noticed something very unusual. In the dense forests of the Côte-Nord region, near Lake Marsal, a large circular structure was visible. Lapointe suspected that it was an old crater created by a meteorite impact. His discovery quickly attracted the attention of professional geologists.
In October 2025 a team of scientists went into the field. The team was led by Gordon Osinski of Western University, who runs a global database of impact craters. The research in the field confirmed Lapointe's suspicions. The scientists found rocks with special cone-shaped fractures, which form only in a very powerful impact. Osinski says that this is the only reliable evidence of an impact that can be seen with the naked eye. They also found a raised area in the centre of the crater, as well as rocks shaped like columns.
The crater measures 25 kilometres across, and its age is estimated at about 390 million years. This means that the meteorite struck the Earth long before the appearance of the first dinosaurs. This is the eleventh confirmed impact crater in the province of Quebec. Today only about 200 such structures are known on the entire Earth. Craters on Earth are hard to discover, because erosion, water and plants erase their traces over millions of years. This crater remained unnoticed for a long time, because it lies in a remote and hard-to-reach area. It is also the largest newly discovered crater since 2018, when the 31-kilometre-wide Hiawatha crater was found under the ice of Greenland.
The name of the crater was chosen in cooperation with the local Innu people, who have lived in this area for centuries.
In September 2026 NASA published a satellite image of the crater. The image was taken by the American satellite Landsat 8 in October 2025. In it the circular shape of the crater can be seen clearly among the forests and lakes of the region. The story shows that even amateurs can make important scientific discoveries.