In 2024 Joël Lapointe was using Google Maps to plan an itinerary along the Côte-Nord, a remote region of Québec, when he noticed an unusual shape around Lac Marsal: a ring roughly 25 kilometres wide, too regular to look like an ordinary valley.
Lapointe is not a geologist, but he sent the images to Pierre Rochette, a French geophysicist, who judged the formation consistent with a crater. The first samples collected in the area contained zircon, a mineral that can form during extremely high-energy impacts. That was not enough proof, however.
In 2025 four researchers made their way to the site, about a hundred kilometres north of the village of Magpie. Getting there required a small floatplane, wading through water with all their equipment, and pushing through unusually dense vegetation. Over five days of exploration they found impact melt rocks and shatter cones, structures produced by the shock waves of extremely violent collisions.
Analysis indicates the crater formed approximately 390 million years ago. It has been named Uhackatik, following consultation with the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit. The findings still need to be presented to the scientific community, but the researchers now consider the meteoritic origin of the formation confirmed.
The discovery began without scientific satellites or expensive missions: with a person looking for somewhere to pitch a tent who zoomed in on the map a little more than necessary.