What Is the Uhakkatik Crater in Quebec?

The Short Answer

The Uhakkatik crater is a 25-kilometer-wide meteorite impact structure in Quebec, Canada, formed approximately 390 million years ago during the Devonian period — making it one of the oldest and largest confirmed impact craters in North America.

How a Google Maps Discovery Put It Back on the Map

The Uhakkatik crater wasn’t lost in the traditional sense — geologists had documented it — but its renewed public attention came from an unlikely source: someone planning a camping trip on Google Maps. Scrolling through satellite imagery of the Quebec wilderness, they noticed an unmistakable circular outline stretching across the landscape. From space, the scar is obvious. From the ground, it has been almost entirely swallowed by 390 million years of erosion, forest growth, and glacial reshaping. It’s a reminder that some of Earth’s most dramatic features are only legible from above.

The Impact That Shaped a Forgotten World

When this meteorite struck, Earth looked nothing like it does today. The impact occurred during the Devonian period, roughly 390 million years ago — more than 150 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared. Quebec wasn’t Quebec. The landmass sat near the tropics as part of the ancient supercontinent Laurussia, likely covered by shallow tropical seas. The rock that absorbed the blow has since traveled thousands of kilometers across the planet’s surface through the slow grind of tectonic drift.

The object that created this crater was large enough to carve a 25-kilometer wound into the crust in an instant. The energy released would have been incomprehensible — vaporizing rock, triggering earthquakes, and sending debris across a continent. Yet today, standing at ground level in Quebec, you would see nothing unusual. Just trees, lakes, and rolling terrain.

Why Canada Has So Many Impact Craters

Canada holds more confirmed meteorite impact craters than any other country on Earth — over 30 verified structures, with scientists confident that dozens more remain buried, eroded, or undiscovered. The reason isn’t that Canada attracts more space rocks. It’s that Canada’s ancient, stable bedrock — part of the Canadian Shield, some of the oldest exposed rock on the planet — preserves impact structures that younger, more geologically active regions would have recycled long ago. Combined with vast wilderness that has seen relatively little urban development or soil disruption, Canada is essentially an open-air archive of cosmic collisions.

What Erosion Hides — and What Satellites Reveal

The near-invisibility of the Uhakkatik crater at ground level is a function of geological time. Ice ages have scraped the surface. Rivers have cut new channels. Vegetation has colonized every available surface. The circular structure that appears so crisp in satellite imagery is, on foot, indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

This is precisely what makes tools like Google Maps and Google Earth so valuable to modern geology. Amateur observers with no field equipment can scan thousands of square kilometers of terrain in an afternoon and flag anomalies that might take ground teams years to survey. The Uhakkatik rediscovery isn’t an isolated case — researchers and enthusiastic amateurs have used satellite imagery to identify previously unrecognized impact candidates on multiple continents.

How Many More Are Out There?

Scientists estimate that Earth has been struck by thousands of large meteorites over its 4.5-billion-year history, but plate tectonics, erosion, and ocean coverage have erased the vast majority of evidence. The roughly 200 confirmed impact craters on record represent only a fraction of what actually occurred. Canada’s wilderness, Greenland’s ice sheets, the Australian outback, and the Sahara are all considered high-probability regions for undiscovered structures. Some may already be sitting in a satellite image, waiting for the right person to notice a slightly too-perfect circle on a Tuesday afternoon.