Anyone who lives on a rural road is used to having to give old-fashioned specific directions to visitors and deliverymen, as GPS systems sometimes can’t figure out the right way to route someone going down a country road.
But GPS-based guidance such as what you get from Google Maps can also reveal “destinations” far outside what a traveler expects to encounter. That’s what happened to Canadian camper Joel Lapointe, who was using the application to find a suitable spot to pitch a tent in the Côte-Nord area of the province of Quebec. As he was examining the map results, Lapointe came across what he called a “suspicious pit.”
It looks like the pit may in fact be a giant impact crater from a long-ago asteroid collision with earth. The depression in the ground measures about nine miles across. It piqued Lapointe’s interest because something about it seemed off; it just didn’t look like the kinds of depressions he usually saw in the landscape.
Expanding his view, Lapointe then saw a small mountain ring around Marsal Lake, which also struck him as out of the ordinary. So he contacted some scientific researchers, and Pierre Rochette, a French geophysicist, said Lapointe’s discovery could very well be the impact point of a meteor that crashed in the distant past. Looking at the lay of the land, Rochette said, “it’s very suggestive of impact.”
Lapointe did one better, giving the researcher soil samples from the pit. Rochette said he found the mineral zircon, which is known to preserve signs of damage from asteroid/meteor impacts. It will take several more rounds of tests to determine if the site is indeed an impact crater. If it turns out to be one, Rochette said, it will be a “major” discovery because the last such crater was discovered in 2013.
NASA indicates that impact craters occur when a space rock hurtling through outer space at several thousand miles per hour hits the planet. The collision makes a shockwave and obliterates life within a certain radius, and leaves telltale marks behind. The force of the impact is enough to melt rock which then reforms into a crystalline pattern that scientists can detect.
There are impact craters all over the earth going back hundreds of millions of years. One of the youngest and most well known is “meteor crater,” or the Barringer crater, in Arizona, thought to be a mere 50,000 years old. The most famous is probably the Chicxulub crater underneath Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico, which is more than 100 miles across. It is widely believed to have been formed by a giant asteroid that wiped most life off the face of the earth, including killing the dinosaurs.
