Manicouagan Reservoir (also Lake Manicouagan) is an annular lake in central

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Government of Canada, Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is ...

, Canada, covering an area of . The

lake island A lake island is any landmass within a lake. It is a type of inland island. Lake islands may form a lake archipelago. Formation Lake islands may form in numerous ways. They may occur through a build-up of sedimentation as shoals, and become ...

in its centre is known as René-Levasseur Island, and its highest point is Mount Babel. The structure was created 214 (±1) million years ago, in the

Late Triassic The Late Triassic is the third and final epoch (geology), epoch of the Triassic geologic time scale, Period in the geologic time scale, spanning the time between annum, Ma and Ma (million years ago). It is preceded by the Middle Triassic Epoch ...

, by the impact of a meteorite in diameter. The lake and island are clearly seen from space and are sometimes called the "eye of Quebec". The lake has a volume of .

Geography

Manicouagan Reservoir in winter by Sentinel-2

The reservoir is located in Manicouagan Regional County Municipality in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, Canada, about north of the city of Baie-Comeau, although its northernmost part is located in Caniapiscau Regional County Municipality. Quebec Route 389 passes the eastern shore of the lake. The crater is a multiple-ring structure about across, with the reservoir at its diameter inner ring being its most prominent feature. It surrounds an inner island plateau called René-Levasseur Island and Mount Babel is the highest peak of the island, at above sea level and above the reservoir level. The Louis-Babel Ecological Reserve makes up the central part of the island.

Impact structure

Manicouagan Reservoir lies within the remnant of an ancient, deeply eroded

impact crater An impact crater is a circular depression in the surface of a solid astronomical object formed by the hypervelocity impact of a smaller object. In contrast to volcanic craters, which result from explosion or internal collapse, impact crater ...

( Impact structure). The crater was formed following the impact of an

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet of the Solar System#Inner solar system, inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic o ...

with a diameter of , which excavated a crater originally about wide, although erosion and deposition of sediments have since reduced the visible diameter to about . It is the Earth's sixth-largest confirmed impact structure according to rim-to-rim diameter. Mount Babel is interpreted as the central peak of the crater, formed by post-impact uplift. 1992 radiometric dating has estimated that impact melt within the impact structure has an age of 214 ± 1 million years. A later estimate found an age of 215.4 ± 0.16 Ma. As this is more than 12 million years before the end of the Triassic, the impact that produced the crater cannot have been the cause of the

Triassic–Jurassic extinction event The Triassic–Jurassic (Tr-J) extinction event, often called the end-Triassic extinction, marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, , and is one of the top five major extinction events of the Phanerozoic eon, profoundly affect ...

Multiple impact event claims

It was suggested that the Manicouagan crater may have been part of a multiple

impact event An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. Impact events have physical consequences and have been found to regularly occur in planetary systems, though the most frequent involve asteroids, comets or ...

which also formed the Rochechouart impact structure in France, the Saint Martin crater in

Manitoba , image_map = Manitoba in Canada 2.svg , map_alt = Map showing Manitoba's location in the centre of Southern Canada , Label_map = yes , coordinates = , capital = Win ...

, the Obolon' crater in

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, and the Red Wing crater in

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. David Rowley, a geophysicist, with the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

, working with John Spray of the

University of New Brunswick The University of New Brunswick (UNB) is a public university with two primary campuses in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick, Saint John, New Brunswick. It is the oldest English-language university in Canada, and among the oldest public un ...

and Simon Kelley of the

Open University The Open University (OU) is a British Public university, public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by List of universities in the United Kingdom by enrolment, number of students. The majority of the OU's underg ...

, discovered that the five craters appeared to form a chain, indicating the breakup and subsequent impact of an asteroid or comet, similar to the well observed string of impacts of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 on

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousandt ...

in 1994. However, more recent work has found that the craters formed many millions of years apart, with the Saint Martin crater dating to 227.8 ± 1.1 Ma. While the Rochechouart structure formed 206.92 ± 0.20/0.32 Ma.

Hydroelectric project

The Manicouagan Reservoir as it presently exists was created in the 1960s, by flooding the earlier Lake Mushalagan (Mouchalagan) to the west of the central plateau and then-smaller Manicouagan to the east, by construction of the Daniel-Johnson dam. The works were part of the enormous Manicouagan or Manic series of hydroelectric projects undertaken by

Hydro-Québec Hydro-Québec is a public utility that manages the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in the Canadian province of Quebec, as well as the export of power to portions of the Northeast United States. It was established by th ...

, the provincial electrical utility. The complex of dams is also called the Manic-Outardes Project because the rivers involved are the

Manicouagan Manicouagan may refer to: *Manicouagan crater, an impact crater in Quebec *Manicouagan Reservoir, formed when the Manicouagan impact crater was converted to a reservoir. *Manicouagan Regional County Municipality, Quebec *Manicouagan River *Manicouag ...

and the Outardes. The reservoir acts as a giant headpond for the Manicouagan River, feeding the Jean-Lesage generating station (Manic-2),

René-Lévesque generating station The René-Lévesque generating station, formerly known as Manic-3, is a hydroelectric power station located 75 km from Baie-Comeau built on Manicouagan River between 1970 and 1976. On June 22, 2010, the dam and the generating station were ren ...

(Manic-3), and Daniel-Johnson Dam ( Manic-5) generating stations downstream. In the peak period of the winter cold, the lake surface is usually lower, since the turbines run all the time at peak load to meet the huge electrical heating needs of the province. The surface of the lake also experiences low levels in the extreme periods of heat in

New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian province ...

during the summer, since in that period Hydro-Québec sells electrical energy to the joint New England grid and individual utilities in the United States.

References

External links