• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Man Finds Unusual Spherical Structure While Browsing Google Maps. It Could Be A Huge Discovery

September 9, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A man browsing Google Maps whilst planning a camping trip in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region has potentially discovered the site of an ancient asteroid impact.

Advertisement

People have discovered all sorts of oddities while browsing through Google Maps, from “aliens” and camera-hogging cats to the answer to decades old cold cases. In the latest find, Joël Lapointe stumbled across an unusual, roughly spherical structure about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) across surrounding Marsal Lake in Quebec.

Lapointe contacted geophysicist Pierre Rochette of the Centre de recherche en géosciences de l’environnement (CEREGE) in France for help identifying the strange feature. 

While generally structures found on Google Maps can turn out to be nothing, the team has determined an ancient impact event could have caused it. 

“Looking at the topography, it’s very suggestive of impact,” Rochette told Canadian news outlet CBC.

Advertisement

Intrigued, Rochette and colleagues took a closer look at the area, and now believe the ring of small mountains surrounding the lake may have previously been miscategorized.

“This formation, interpreted as a volcanoclastic diatreme formation named Marsal breccia, in an area devoid of post Grenvillian magmatism […] is in fact more in agreement with a crater floor clast-poor melt rock, quite similar to the Mistastin and Janisjarvi cases,” the team wrote in a new paper.

The area shows no sign of a gravity anomaly, where gravity is stronger or weaker than the expected value based on the amount of mass we believe to be in the area (think slightly denser or lighter rock). However, the team believes that the data isn’t fine-grained enough to distinguish an anomaly smaller than 10-15 kilometers (6.2-9.3 miles) in diameter, requiring further fieldwork.

While not confirmed, signs do look promising that Lapointe stumbled across an ancient impact event while idly browsing Google Maps. Looking at samples taken from the site, the team identified silicates, abundant magnetite, sulfides, and zircons, all promising indications of impact melt rock.  Based on levels of erosion, the team estimates that the impact could have taken place between 450 and 38 million years ago.

Advertisement

“Based on the already available preliminary evidence, Lake Marsal seems to be a serious candidate to become the 11th confirmed impact structure from Quebec,” the team wrote, adding “confirmation of impact origin may be gained from the available sampling or else may wait for a future dedicated expedition.”

The team hopes to visit the site soon, to assess it for further evidence of an impact event.

The findings were presented in a paper at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society 2024.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Bolivian president calls for global debt relief for poor countries
  2. Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via FoodTech
  3. Humanity’s Journey To A Metal-Rich Asteroid Launches Today. Here’s How To Watch
  4. Ancient DNA Reveals People Caught Leprosy From Adorable Woodland Critters In Medieval England

Source Link: Man Finds Unusual Spherical Structure While Browsing Google Maps. It Could Be A Huge Discovery

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version