Joël Lapointe was planning a camping trip in 2024 when a circle on a satellite map stopped him. The amateur astronomer, scrolling through imagery of Quebec’s remote Côte-Nord region near Lake Marsal, saw a shape that looked too regular to be an accident of terrain and passed it to impact specialists. It has now been confirmed as a 25-kilometer impact crater.
The structure, named Uhackatik, is about 16 miles across and roughly 390 million years old. A team led by Gordon Osinski of Western University reached it in October 2025 and found the rock evidence that settles the question. NASA’s Earth Observatory published the story on September 15 and updated it on September 25.
A circle on a map, and a report to the experts
Lapointe was using Google Earth to look for places to camp, not for craters. According to ABC News, he reported the sighting to scientists at Aix-Marseille University in France, and ScienceDaily’s version of the story says he contacted specialists across Europe and North America about a possible impact structure. French researchers began investigating, and the image the Planetary Society later published came from Google Earth, captured by Osinski.
Lapointe urged everyone “to not ignore intuition or an observation” even outside their own specialty, he told media outlets after the confirmation. His report matters to the field beyond the crater itself. Osinski told ABC News it was “the first time a sighting reported by a member of the public has ever been established as an impact crater.”
Shatter cones in the outcrops
A circular outline is not proof. Volcanic structures can look similar, and the field team’s job was to tell the difference. The NASA Earth Observatory account says the researchers identified shatter cones in rock outcrops, which confirmed an impact origin rather than a volcanic diatreme. Shatter cones are distinctive fractures that form only under the pressures of an impact.
The timeline is long by the standards of a viral discovery. The sighting came in 2024, the expedition in October 2025, and the public announcement in September 2026, with the French group and Osinski’s Canadian team each doing part of the work. Osinski, according to ABC News, recalled being “pretty convinced” on site that it was an impact crater, though the team still collected samples to test for melted rock and for shatter cones, the features that would turn conviction into evidence.
Osinski called them “the only unequivocal evidence of an impact event” that can be seen in the field with the naked eye. The fieldwork was not easy. The team arrived by floatplane and had to wade through water for about 50 meters, and Osinski described the terrain as among the most difficult he had worked in across six continents, with “deep, twisty, gnarly vegetation.”
The structure is a complex crater, meaning it has a raised central uplift, and its high cliffs show columnar jointing. Rock samples date the impact to about 390 million years ago, during the Devonian Period and more than 100 million years before dinosaurs existed. The Planetary Society’s summary describes the result in a single sentence: field investigations “have found geological evidence that this previously unknown feature is indeed a crater from an impact 390 million years ago.”
Size, name, and what is still pending
At 25 kilometers, Uhackatik is the largest impact crater found since the 31-kilometer Hiawatha structure beneath the Greenland ice, which was reported in Science Advances in 2018, according to NASA’s account. Hiawatha, found by Kurt Kjær’s team at the University of Copenhagen using ice-penetrating radar, was made by an iron meteorite about a kilometer wide and ranks among Earth’s 25 largest craters, according to the 2018 coverage of the discovery. Uhackatik is smaller, but it is the more visible story: an ancient scar in open Quebec forest, spotted by someone browsing maps for a tent site. Uhackatik’s name was chosen in consultation with the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit.
Osinski, who directs the Impact Earth database of the world’s impact structures, also offered a sense of what an impact of that size would do today. A comparable modern impact would cause “regional devastation on a scale that would wipe out major cities and have global climate impacts,” he said.
One step remains. Formal recognition by the Meteoritical Society’s committee is expected but was still pending in the reports from NASA and ABC, with ABC saying the discovery will be presented at a Meteoritical Society conference in Germany. Until that vote, Uhackatik is a confirmed impact site awaiting its official place on the list. The reports do not say when the committee will meet, so the date of formal recognition, like the name’s final entry in the record, remains open.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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