Joël Lapointe wasn't looking for a meteorite crater. He was scrolling through satellite maps in 2024, trying to plan a camping trip into Quebec's remote Côte-Nord region, when a nearly perfect circular pattern of ridges around Lake Marsal caught his eye. His first instinct, by his own account, was disbelief. "I told myself, 'You haven't discovered anything, Joël, it's not possible, they must already know about this,'" he told the Canadian Press.

They didn't. The circular formation wasn't in any crater database Lapointe checked, so he emailed specialists in Europe and North America with his hunch. Eighteen months and one grueling wilderness expedition later, geologists have confirmed the Uhackatik impact structure: a 25-kilometer-wide scar left by a space rock that slammed into Earth roughly 390 million years ago, Quebec's eleventh known impact site and the first one identified by an amateur skywatcher hunting for a place to pitch a tent.

From a suspicious pit to a scientific meeting

Lapointe's tip didn't get acted on immediately. French researchers took the possibility seriously enough to present the Lake Marsal area as a candidate impact structure at a Meteoritical Society meeting in 2024, based largely on the satellite imagery's suggestive shape. That's normally where a promising-looking geological anomaly can stall for years, since confirming an impact structure requires physical evidence that satellite photos alone can't provide.

Gordon Osinski, a planetary geology professor at Western University and director of the Impact Earth crater database, was initially doubtful. Circular landscape features show up constantly in satellite imagery, and most of them turn out to be eroded volcanic calderas, sinkholes, or entirely mundane geological coincidences rather than impact sites. Still, the evidence was compelling enough that Osinski co-led a four-person expedition to the site in October 2025 to check it out in person.

What the team found in Quebec's back country

The expedition itself was brutal. "This was one of the most arduous expeditions I've ever done, and I've done 25 expeditions to the Arctic and six continents," Osinski told Live Science, describing terrain that was rough, rugged, and thick with bugs. Previous geological mapping of the area had explained the unusual local rocks as the product of a diatreme, a funnel-shaped pipe of fragmented rock formed by explosive volcanic eruptions, a plausible-sounding alternative that had gone unchallenged for years.

That explanation didn't survive the trip. By the expedition's second day, the team had identified shatter cones scattered across numerous rock outcrops, distinctive cone-shaped fracture patterns that form only under the extreme pressures generated by a hypervelocity impact, or, far more rarely, at nuclear test sites. "It's the only unequivocal evidence of an impact event that you can see in the field with the naked eye," Osinski said, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. The team also documented extensive impact melt rock, material fused by the heat and pressure of the collision itself, in cliffs roughly four kilometers from the structure's center.

Dating a scar left before dinosaurs existed

Back in the lab, researchers led by geochemist Jérôme Gattacceca analyzed the collected rock samples to pin down when the impact actually happened. The dating placed the event at approximately 390 million years ago, deep in the Devonian period, tens of millions of years before the first dinosaurs would walk the Earth. Gattacceca described the broader significance simply, telling Radio-Canada the discovery was "a beautiful lesson that our planet, even though we have studied it a lot, still holds beautiful surprises and continues to amaze us."

The confirmed structure spans 25 kilometers across and qualifies as a complex crater, a category reserved for impact sites large enough that the ground rebounds after collision, producing features like a raised central uplift. Uhackatik has exactly that, along with dramatic cliffs displaying columnar jointing near its center, a rock formation pattern created as the impact-heated material cooled and contracted.

Why so few of these have ever been found

Earth carries the scars of countless ancient impacts, yet geologists have confirmed only around 200 impact structures worldwide, a strikingly small number for a planet that's existed for 4.5 billion years. The reason is straightforward: weather, tectonic activity, glaciation, and vegetation steadily erase the physical evidence of prehistoric collisions, often within a few hundred million years. Craters that survive tend to do so in stable, relatively undisturbed terrain, exactly the kind of remote, sparsely populated wilderness where Lapointe happened to be planning his trip.

That scarcity is also why Uhackatik's discovery matters beyond its own borders. It's a reminder that Earth's cratering record remains far from complete, and that some of the planet's largest ancient scars are still sitting unnoticed on public satellite maps, waiting for anyone curious enough to zoom in and ask an inconvenient question about a shape that doesn't quite look natural. The find echoes a broader pattern researchers keep running into: Colombian volcanic rock recently forced geologists to push back the timeline for when Central and South America physically collided, evidence that the planet's deep geological history still holds surprises even in well-studied regions.

What a similar impact would mean today

Osinski didn't shy away from putting the discovery in modern terms. An object capable of carving a 25-kilometer crater striking a populated region today, he said, would cause "regional devastation on a scale that would wipe out major cities and have global climate impacts." That's a sobering reminder that impacts of this scale, while statistically rare on human timescales, are neither hypothetical nor confined to prehistory; they've simply become rarer as Earth's population of large nearby asteroids has thinned over billions of years.

It's also a useful counterpoint to how casually ancient extinction-adjacent events tend to get treated in popular science coverage. Just as genetic testing recently overturned decades of assumptions about what the so-called American cheetah actually was, Uhackatik's confirmation shows how much of Earth's deep past still hinges on somebody, professional or amateur, noticing a detail that doesn't fit the existing story and refusing to let it go.

What comes next for Lapointe and the crater

For Lapointe, the outcome landed somewhere between validation and disbelief. "It's not every day that an ordinary citizen finds a 390-million-year-old crater," he wrote to Radio-Canada after the confirmation was announced. "I'm still quite blown away." Researchers will likely continue studying Uhackatik's rock record for clues about the size and speed of the original impactor, work that could refine estimates of how often objects capable of this kind of regional devastation have struck Earth over geological time.

For everyone else, the discovery is a genuinely rare kind of good news story in planetary science: proof that meaningful contributions to understanding Earth's violent history don't always require a research grant or a telescope, sometimes just an idle afternoon with a map and the willingness to ask an expert whether that weird-looking circle actually means something.