- A man planning a camping trip using Google Maps ran across a uniquely curved spherical pit in Quebec and started asking questions.
- The site is now considered a “strong contender” to be a meteorite impact crater.
- Samples from the site reveal zircon, a mineral that commonly forms after a major impact event.
Scouting out a camping trip using Google Maps can help to gain a bit of understanding of the terrain you’re about to embark into. It can also potentially reveal the site of an ancient asteroid impact crater that then spurs international research.
At least that’s true of Joël Lapointe’s experience. After firing up Google’s map software to plan a camping trip in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region, he told CBC, he found the curve of what turned out to be a roughly nine-mile-diameter pit near a ring of small mountains surrounding Marsal Lake, roughly 60 miles north of Magpie, Quebec. The formation struck him as odd, and he eventually got in touch with Pierre Rochette, a French geophysicist with France’s Environmental Geosciences Research Center (CERGE), to share the data.
So far, the evidence points toward the impact of a space rock causing the crater. Rochette is encouraged enough about the find that he presented the scenario at the recent Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Brussels and hopes a trip to the site can finalize the discovery.
“Looking at the topography,” Rochette told CBC, “it’s very suggestive of impact.”
Early samples from the site contain zircon, a mineral known to form after a major impact event.
Now, the French scientist is working with Canadians to explore the site further, hoping to visit it in 2025 to conduct tests, potentially turning what is a promising find into the sure thing. “It’s quite easy with Google Earth these days to go on and find structures that are circular or semi-circular in origin,” Gordon Osinski, an Earth sciences professor at Western University in Ontario now working with Rochette, told CBC. “You know, nine times out of 10 they’re not [craters].”
But the team is still hopeful enough this is that 10 percent that it wants to head there in person to see if they can confirm the find. The key in declaring the site a meteorite impact crater centers around the existence of shatter cones, basically branch-like cracks in the bedrock. “Those are essentially unequivocal evidence of meteorite impact,” Osinski said, adding this site is a “strong contender.”
If the team can determine the site is a crater formed by an ancient impact event, then the next step is researching just when it happened. Of the world’s roughly 200 impact craters, 31 are located in Canada. Quebec itself has 10 other known impact sites.
In the presentation to the Meteoritical Society, Rochette showed how the ring of mountains surrounding the lake really does fall more in line with a crater. “Based on the already available preliminary evidence,” the team wrote, “Lake Marsal seems to be a serious candidate to become the 11th confirmed impact structure from Quebec.”
Any final call on the true origin of Lake Marsal’s depth comes from an expedition, or as Lapointe may call it: a camping trip. The whole event may soon come full circle.
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.