A Google Maps User Accidentally Discovered A Giant Meteorite Crater No One Knew Existed

Besides helping you reach your destination as fast as possible, Google Maps is also useful for discovering places of interest around you, whether in a new city or in your neighborhood. The navigation app offers plenty of details about local hotels, restaurants, and shops, including opening hours, photos, and user reviews, in addition to directions to those places. But Google Maps can be used for even bigger discoveries than finding a brand-new ice cream place around the corner. Think of much larger points of interest that were hiding in plain sight for hundreds of millions of years, like a massive crater with a diameter of 15.5 miles that was accidentally found by a Google Maps user who was planning a trip with the app.

Joël Lapointe is an amateur astronomer from Canada who was researching a camping trip in the Côte-Nord region in Quebec in 2024 when he noticed a circular pattern that looked like the impact crater of a meteorite. Centered on Lake Marsal, about 62 miles north of Magpie, the impact site is now known as the Uhaachatik (spelled Uhackatik on Google Maps) Crater. Discovering a would-be meteorite impact crater isn't enough to get it confirmed and named. Lapointe was in contact with researchers who came to Canada to take soil samples and determine whether they contained evidence that would confirm a meteorite impact.

British professor Gordon Osinski and his team of geologists confirmed Lapointe's suspicion. Initially, they found traces of zircon at the site of the impact, a material that can form during such events. That wasn't the only evidence a meteorite had hit Earth millions of years ago.

When Lapointe found the crater-like structure, he believed the suspected impact crater had a 9-mile diameter, significantly smaller than the scientific findings that followed. According to planetary geologist Gordon Osinski, the crater is one of the largest impact structures identified in recent years. In addition to zircon, the researchers found shatter cones in the rocks around Lake Marsal, which form when shockwaves from the impact pass through the soil. They also discovered melt rock, which requires high temperatures and pressures to form, conditions that are met during a violent impact.

The lab tests that followed established the age of the meteorite crater. The space rock hit Earth about 390 million years ago, forming the massive crater that Lapointe found accidentally on Google Maps. The impact structure became known as the Uhaachatik Crater after the scientists discussed their findings with the Ekuanitshit Innu council in the area. While the space object must have had a significant size to leave such a large impact crater behind, this wasn't a dinosaur-killing event because dinosaurs did not roam the planet at the time. The first dinosaur species appeared about 230 million years ago, more than 150 million years after the Uhaachatik impact.

According to Osinski's comments to LiveScience, the scientific community is aware of about 200 impact craters on the planet. The researcher noted that about one or two new craters are discovered every year, but most of them measure 3 to 6 miles in size. That said, Google's mapping software, including Google Maps and Google Earth, has been instrumental in other discoveries in recent years.

For example, the discovery of the Kamil Crater began with a Google Earth search conducted in 2008. According to the European Space Agency, the Kamil Crater is "one of the best-preserved meteorite impact sites ever found." To put things in perspective, the Kamil Crater is 148 feet wide and about 52 feet deep. It was caused by a 10-tonne object that measured 4 feet across. The agency estimates the plume following the impact would have been visible about 600 miles away.

Scientists have used Google Maps and Google Earth for discoveries unrelated to space debris. For example, Lee Berger used Google Earth to find the Malapa region in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind after analyzing potential caves on the map. In 2008, excavation work at the site discovered a hominin species dating back to almost two million years, Australopithecus sediba. Separately, satellite imagery from Google Earth was used to identify Mount Mabu in Mozambique. Sometimes called the Google Forest, the region houses about 7,880 hectares (19,472 acres) of unexplored rainforest, and is home to at least 10 newly identified species, as of 2014.