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| Artist's rendition of the massive 70-kilometre (43.5-mile) water ring surrounding René-Levasseur Island. |
Leave it to Mother Nature and Canadian engineers to team up on a 214-million-year-old project, lol! Talk about a wild view from space, folks. When you look at satellite photos or hear NASA astronauts talk about looking down at Earth and spotting this giant, perfect blue bullseye in the middle of nowhere, you can't help but ask: "How on earth did a ring that huge get there?!" I know while researching this one I kept stopping, zooming in on maps, shaking my head, and typing...
We tend to think human civil engineering and cosmic catastrophes belong in totally different history books. But northern Quebec is the one place on the planet where an ancient, devastating mountain of space rock blasted the mold, and a modern mega-dam stepped in millions of years later to turn on the faucet. It's the kind of mind-bending Canadian history that makes you stop and appreciate the sheer, brute scale of our wilderness...
At first glance from an airplane window, the rugged wilderness of northern Quebec looks like an endless blanket of dense boreal forest and jagged Canadian Shield. But if you climb high enough into low Earth orbit, a bizarre, massive blue circle suddenly breaks the landscape. Known affectionately by NASA astronauts as the "Eye of Quebec," this 70-kilometre (43.5-mile) ring of water completely encircles a massive elevated landmass in its center. What looks like a modern geographic anomaly is actually a spectacular cosmic accident—a violent Triassic catastrophe that lay incomplete for millennia until a mid-century hydroelectric project inadvertently finished what the universe started...