A camping trip search on Google Maps has led to the confirmation of a 390 million-year-old meteorite crater in Quebec.
Joël Lapointe spotted an unusual indentation near Marsal Lake in the Côte-Nord region while planning hiking routes, and as an amateur astronomer he suspected it could be an impact site.
Researchers have now confirmed he was right, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
A team of geologists examined the site after Lapointe’s 2024 report and verified that a meteorite struck Earth at that location. Their research will be presented at the annual congress of the Meteoritical Society, to be held from August 9 to 14 in Frankfurt, Germany.
Many public reports of possible meteor craters turn out to be false, but scientists thought Lapointe’s find warranted a closer look.
“Looking at the topography, it’s very suggestive of impact,” Pierre Rochette, geophysicist at the French Research Center for Geosciences and the Environment in Aix-en-Provence, France, told CBC.
The pit is about 15 kilometres wide and forms a near-perfect ring of small mountains around Lake Marsal.
It had originally been interpreted as a volcanoclastic diatreme formation, where magma rises through a crack in Earth’s crust, but researchers said its features appeared to match a crater floor more closely.
In October 2025, a team of geologists spent five days at the site gathering evidence.
According to LiveScience, samples from the area contained zircon, a mineral that often forms during meteor impacts. The team also identified shatter cones, cone-shaped patterns caused by shockwaves moving through the ground, and found large cliffs of impact melt rock formed by the pressure and heat of an asteroid or meteorite strike.
Based on that evidence, the geologists confirmed the pit was created by a meteorite impact millions of years ago.
The team named it Uhaachatik Crater after discussions with the Ekuanitshit Innu council, which represents Indigenous people in the area, LiveScience reported.
Impact Earth’s database lists about 200 confirmed impact sites on Earth, including 27 in Canada. The last confirmed site before this was announced in 2010.
“It’s not every day that an ordinary citizen finds a 390-million-year-old crater,” Lapointe said in an interview with Radio-Canada. “I encourage everyone to not ignore intuition or an observation, even if it isn’t part of your field of expertise.”
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