He was looking for a campsite. He found a hole in Earth’s history.
Joël Lapointe only wanted a place to pitch a tent. In 2024 he was dragging his cursor across maps of Quebec’s remote Côte-Nord, hunting for a quiet spot to camp. Then, near Lake Marsal, a nearly perfect circle appeared. Not a river bend. Not an old quarry. A ring tens of kilometres across, as if something enormous had once pressed a thumb into the forest.
An amateur astronomer, Lapointe did not shrug it off. He wrote to specialists. That is how a camping trip turned into the story of a scar Earth had been hiding for 390 million years.
Confirmed impact craters are rare: only about two hundred are known. Geologists suspect hundreds more still lie under forest, ice and bog. Uhackatik almost joined the unseen.
French researchers picked up the tip first. At a 2024 meeting of the Meteoritical Society they flagged Lake Marsal as the possible centre of Quebec’s eleventh impact structure. The lead then reached Gordon Osinski of Western University, the planetary geologist who runs Earth’s impact-crater database and has learned how often a “perfect circle” on a map is a trick of the eye.
He was sceptical. In October 2025 he went anyway.
Getting there was ugly. The floatplane could not reach the shore, so the team waded fifty metres with their gear. After that came muskeg, insects and brush thick enough to swallow a trail. Local rocks had long been written off as a diatreme — a volcanic pipe. A tidy story. The wrong one.
The answer was in the stones. On the second day the team found shatter cones: ribbed, blast-sculpted structures that form only under the colossal pressure of an impact. Osinski calls them the one unambiguous field signature of a collision you can see with the naked eye. The debate ended there.
The picture now is clear. Uhackatik is a complex crater about 25 kilometres across: a central uplift, high cliffs with columnar jointing, sheets of melt rock tens of metres thick. The strike came in the Devonian, roughly 390 million years ago — a hundred million years before a later burst of impacts linked to chaos in the asteroid belt. There were no dinosaurs yet. No Côte-Nord forest, either. Just another version of Earth, hit hard enough that the same blow today, Osinski estimates, would flatten a whole region, erase major cities and jolt the planet’s climate.
The name was chosen with the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit, whose traditional territory holds the site: Uhackatik. It is the largest such find since the 31-kilometre Hiawatha crater under Greenland’s ice, reported in 2018. A Meteoritical Society committee still has to make it official. In the field, the verdict is already in. The circle on the map was neither coincidence nor a volcano.
Lapointe was looking for a quiet shore. He found the mark of a cosmic disaster the forest had kept for nearly four hundred million years. Sometimes all it takes is not scrolling past the map too fast.