Quebec
Lake Manicouagan, nicknamed the Eye of Quebec, is classified as an annular lake: a circular lake created by meteorite impact.
Quebec seems to be a target for extraterrestrial objects, as the lake-studded landscape is home to at least two craters created by meteorite impacts. But viewed from above, Lake Manicouagan in central Quebec is ring-shaped, with an outer circle of water enclosing a raised central island, while the Pingualuit Crater, far to the north, is almost perfectly round. The different shapes of the lakes are a factor of age: Lake Manicouagan is 214 million years old, while the Pingualuit Crater is around 1.4 million years old. Two hundred million additional years of erosion have shaped the Manicouagan impact crater into a very different kind of scar, exposing the deepest structures of the impact ring.
The meteorite that created the Lake Manicouagan crater is estimated to have had a diameter of around three miles, originally punching a hole in the planet’s surface more than sixty miles across, accompanied by a shock wave that roared outward at 600 miles per hour. Erosion has smudged the edges of this original ring down to the forty-mile-wide crater we can see today from altitude—a ring-shaped lake fed and drained by tendrils of rivers to the north and south. Still, this is the sixth-largest visible impact crater on Earth, and even larger rings from the event may have been erased altogether by erosion. Lake Manicouagan is classified as an annular lake: a circular lake created by a meteorite impact. Its distinctive shape inspired its nickname, the Eye of Quebec.
Because the Lake Manicouagan crater dates to the early Triassic Period, scientists had long wondered whether the impact could have played a role in the extinction event between the Triassic and the Jurassic Periods, when nearly half of all life-forms on Earth disappeared from the fossil record. More accurate dating methods, however, have shown the impact took place about 12 million years before the major waves of extinctions, making it unlikely that this impact was the smoking gun.
The creation of the Manicouagan Reservoir in the 1960s, involving the flooding of Lake Manicouagan and building of a dam and a series of hydroelectric plants, further altered the lake. With a volume of thirty-three cubic miles, Manicouagan Reservoir is the fifth-largest manmade reservoir in the world by volume. Hydroelectric power produced here is used to power whole regions of Quebec and New England.
The aurora borealis shimmers across Quebec, Canada, in this view from space, highlighting the forty-mile-wide crater of Lake Manicouagan in the image’s lower right corner.
You might fly over Lake Manicouagan en route to Quebec City, Quebec, but the reservoir is more than 300 miles north of the closest major airport.
