Someone claims to have found the site of an ancient asteroid crash on Google Maps

While researching an area of Canada ahead of a camping trip, a man claimed to have found evidence of a spot an ancient asteroid crashed using Google Maps.

Joel Lapointe was planning his trip to the Cote-Nord region in Quebec when he came across the potentially extraordinary discovery.

According to CBC, Lapointe said something about its curve seemed suspicious and he also spotted a ring of small mountains about eight kilometres in diameter around Marsal Lake.

He told French geophysicist Pierre Rochette about it and now Rochette is part of a team of scientists investigating the site as a potential meteorite impact crater.

Rochette, with the Centre de recherche en geosciences de l'environnement in Aix-en-Provence, France, said: "Looking at the topography, it's very suggestive of impact."

Analysis is not yet conclusive but is reported to be encouraging and Rochette said the discovery would be "major" since the last meteorite this big was last discovered in 2013.

According to NASA, an impact crater is forged from shockwaves which melt and crystallise rock after a meteorite crashes into a planet at a speed of thousands of kilometres-per-hour (KPH).

Tara Hayden, postdoctoral associate at Western University's department of Earth sciences, said craters can date back 100 million years and can be from some of the earliest material from our Solar System.

Of almost 200 confirmed impact craters on Planet Earth, 31 are in Canada, according to Gordon Osinski, an Earth sciences professor at Western University.

But he exercised caution when speaking about a potential 32nd.

"It's quite easy with Google Earth these days to go on and find structures that are circular or semi-circular in origin," he said.

"You know, nine times out of 10 they're not craters."

However these findings have proved promising enough for scientists to investigate on this occasion.

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