Discovery in the Tundra

The northwestern tip of Quebec, just south of Baffin Island, is flat, sodden tundra sprinkled thickly with little lakes. Most of them are irregularly shaped. But Prospector Fred W. Chubb noticed, while poring over an aerial photograph, that one lake was almost round and surrounded by a wall of rock. Chubb showed the photo to Dr. V. Ben Meen, director of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum of Geology and Mineralogy.

This week Dr. Meen returned from a quick air visit to the lake and reported that it was almost certainly a meteorite crater (there was no lava or other sign of volcanic activity), and the biggest yet discovered. The lake in the crater (still frozen at the end of July) is 2 1/2 miles across, compared with Arizona's famed meteorite crater, which is four-fifths of a mile across. Its level is about 80 feet above that of other small lakes in the vicinity, and around it is a ring of shattered granite that rises 550 feet above the tundra. The rim is lowest on the northwest side, which suggests that the meteorite came from that direction and hit the ground obliquely.

Dr. Meen found no meteoric iron, only a reddish rock that might prove to be the peculiar stony material of which some meteorites are made. But there was plenty of other evidence that some enormous body had buried itself in the earth: shattered blocks of stone from football to freight-car size, and concentric circles in the granite around the crater, like ripples stirred up by a pebble dropped into still water.

Dr. Meen estimated that the meteorite must have fallen at least 3,000 years ago, since there are no Indian or Eskimo legends about it. He named it Chubb Crater after the sharp-eyed prospector, and promised that a full-dress expedition would report on it within a year.

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