Impact crater discovery isn't supposed to happen because someone was scouting a campsite, but that's the story here. Dr. Gordon Osinski, a planetary geology professor at Western University, hears from strangers with a weird shape on the map all the time, and almost none of them pan out.

This one did. Reaching it took a three hour drive and a float plane into a remote stretch of Quebec, and once it was confirmed, the age came back far older than anyone on the team guessed: roughly 390 million years.

That kind of confirmation is rare for a reason. Volcanoes are erupting somewhere on Earth right now, so scientists can study one happening live. Nobody gets that with meteorite impacts, which makes a confirmed crater like this one of the only real windows into how they actually form.

Topics: impact crater, planetary geology, Quebec discovery, Western University, meteorite science

GUEST: Dr. Gordon Osinski | @‌drcrater

Originally aired on 2026-07-21