The southeastern part of Hudson Bay is an incredibly remote place that also happens to be filled with some fascinating little geographic oddities. First is the featured image, the Nastapoka Arc, a nearly perfect circular arc, covering a little over 160° of a 450-kilometre-wide circle. It was long theorized that the Arc was created by an ancient asteroid impact, but a geological expedition in the 1970s uncovered no evidence of such an event, and today most scientists believe it is a tectonic boundary that formed nearly 2 billion years ago when one layer of rock was subsided beneath another, and that the circular nature of the landform is merely a coincidence.

But on the subject of impact craters, here’s the next oddity, about 100 kilometres east of the Arc:

This is Lac Wiyâshâkimî, also known as the Clearwater Lakes in English, and as you might suspect they are, in fact, a pair of impact craters that have filled with water, and are so close together that they are a single body of water. The western crater is approximately 36 kilometers across, and the eastern is slightly smaller, at 26 kilometres. For a long time, it was widely believed that these two craters formed at the same time from the impact of a binary asteroid, but later invesitgation revealed that the eastern crater was formed between 460 and 470 million years ago, while it’s western neighbor formed around 286 million years ago. By complete coincidence, two of the largest and most visible impact craters on the Earth’s surface are located right next to one another.

Finally, let’s go back west, 100 kilometres into Hudson Bay:

This archipelago is Sanikiluaq, Nunavut (the Belcher Islands in English). While they look like delicate sandbars, these islands are actually made up of 2 billion year-old metamorphic rock. They owe their unique shape to the glaciation of the most recent ice ages, as the movement of the massive ice sheets carved them into their current shape as they passed over. The islands are home to one settlement, also called Sanikiluaq, with a population of 882. It is the southernmost settlement in Nunavut.

I hope you found this collection of geographic tibits interesting and\or not too strenous to scroll past. Have a great day!