Quebec
Viewed from the air, the deep, pure water in Pingualuit Crater appears electric blue and the lake’s contours seem perfectly round. Located on the Ungava Peninsula in northern Quebec, this circular lake sits inside the scar left in the planet’s crust by a meteorite impact 1.4 million years ago.
Pingualuit translates from the Inuit language as “place where the land rises.” From the ground, the crater does appear as nothing more than a sharp rise; the rim looms 500 feet taller than the surrounding landscape. When the meteorite hit the hard rock of the Canadian Shield, it exploded, melting thousands of tons of rock and incinerating itself in the process. Today, few traces of the extraterrestrial rock have been detected near the impact zone. The force of the crash shattered and shocked the rocks that now make up the crater rim, causing them to expand out and up, forming a raised ring in an otherwise flat landscape.
Northern Quebec is dotted with thousands of lakes and waterways, but only Pingualuit Crater is almost perfectly round, thanks to its origin as a meteorite impact crater.
The crater the meteorite left behind is wider than two miles in diameter and filled with water nearly to the brim. At 1300 feet deep, the giant pool qualifies as one of the world’s deepest lakes. There are no inlets or outlets, but the lake does host a population of Arctic char fish, whose isolation from other char populations has made the species genetically unique. All the lake’s water comes from accumulations of rain and snowmelt, making for exceptionally clear freshwater.
For thousands of years, the Inuit considered Pingualuit Crater a sacred place of healing. During World War II, pilots used its nearly perfect round shape to navigate across the often-confusing, lake-covered landscape of northern Quebec. Today the crater is protected within the boundaries of Pingualuit National Park.
This impact crater lake is also considered a valuable resource for climate scientists. Northern Canada has been thoroughly scoured by glaciers over the last two ice ages, removing all traces of dirt, dust, and pollen that might offer clues about the ecological and climate history of this region before the Pleistocene Epoch. But the depths of Pingualuit Crater hold about thirty feet of sediments that date back to before the last ice age. Several expeditions have drilled cores out of these sediments and used the fossilized insects, pollen, and algae preserved within to study the area’s climate over the past 120,000 years.
The isolated Pingualuit Crater is more than sixty miles from the closest settlement and difficult to view except by air via a chartered flight. Look for a bright blue circle that stands out in the lake-covered landscape.
