There’s a few notable crater lakes in Quebec. My favourite by far, though, are the Clearwater lakes/Lac Wiyâshâkimî in the far northeast. Two impact craters almost right on top of one another, now filled with water. What makes them really interesting to me is that they aren’t caused by one space rock breaking in two just before hitting the ground. The two lakes have been proven to be created almost 200M years apart, which means two separate asteroids hit almost exactly the same spot, separated by 200M years or so.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It’s the Manicouagan Reservoir, believed to be caused by a crater formed a full 214 million years ago, (wow) when an asteroid hit the Earth in the Late Triassic period.

There’s basically this circular lake that makes the centre island appear dry, kind of as if there’s a moat surrounding the impact area.

You’ll find the odd outfitter along Lac Manicougan — and if you keep driving along Highway 389 for another 270 kilometres, you’ll hit the bustling metropolis of Labrador City, just to give you an idea of how rural we are talking here.

While this particular crater and corresponding reservoir were formed millions of years ago, different kinds of meteor-type things are entering our atmosphere all the time.

The Maine Mineral and Gem Museum recently made big news across the Maritimes by offering $25,000 US to anyone who can produce elements of whatever “space rock” came to Earth on the mile-wide “strewn field” that stretches from just north of Waite, Maine, to Canoose, N.B.

This story was produced by John Batt as part of the CBC Creator Network.

I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Can’t say I’ve ever looked at a non political map of Quebec until now. Pretty neat though.