In 2024, a Google Maps user was planning a trip using the app; And what he found was a giant meteorite crater…

Joel Lapointe was doing something completely ordinary. A Canadian amateur astronomer opened up Google Maps in 2024, scrolling through Quebec’s Côte-Nord region to plan hiking trails for a camping trip. Somewhere north of Magpie, around Lake Marsal, the terrain stopped looking like terrain. It looked like a ring, an almost perfectly circular scar pressed into the forest, about 25 kilometers across. His first instinct was to talk himself out of this. Surely someone has already recorded this. Lapointe reviewed databases of craters he knew of and found them empty, so he submitted a report to Impact Earth, a collective crater registry based at Western University in Ontario. Two years later, that hunch has a name. The structure is now called Uhackatik, and geologists say it was carved by a meteorite about 390 million years ago.

Shatter cones and melted rocks: How geologists confirm Quebec impact crater

Planetary geologist Gordon Osinski, who runs Impact Earth, was initially skeptical, as most of the reports he received turned out to be nothing. He co-led an expedition to the site anyway in October 2025, and battled the terrain. Osinski, who has made 25 Arctic expeditions across six continents, described this mission as among the most difficult trips he has undertaken, as the terrain was brutal and the insects were relentless.The second day decided it. The team found crash cones, the branching fracture patterns that form when a shock wave tears apart rock and heads toward impact. They also found significant exposures of impact melt, which is rock that liquefies in impact, then recools, and which typically erodes long before anyone can see it. Zircon traces added to the case.

Why Uhackatik is one of the largest Meteor crater Discoveries in the years

There are only about 200 confirmed impact craters worldwide, and one or two of them appear annually, usually within 5 to 10 km. Uhackatik is several times that. Osinski believes the last discovery on a similar scale was the Hiawatha structure spotted under Greenland’s ice in 2018, whose size and origin remain disputed. This is not mysterious.The 390 million-year history places the impact long before the existence of dinosaurs, with the oldest species appearing about 230 million years ago. The name came after consultation with the Innu Council of Equanichit, on whose traditional lands it is located. The results will be sent to the Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in Frankfurt this month, before peer review.Google Maps and Google Earth have cracked open discoveries beforeSatellite images have a look here. The remarkably intact Kamel Crater in Egypt turned up through a Google Earth search in 2008. That same year, paleontologist Lee Berger used it to identify the cave system in South Africa that gave rise to Australopithecus sediba.As Lapointe said, ordinary citizens don’t find 390 million-year-old craters every day.