Forgive an early digression, but with few having heard of geoparks, readers are owed an explanation. While most are likely familiar with world heritage sites and world biosphere reserves — traditional pillars of awareness, preservation and regional cooperation administered by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — global geoparks are a relative newcomer.

Geoparks are areas of globally significant geology that employ unique features — geosites — to promote natural, climatic, historic and cultural values in educational and interactive ways. They highlight the importance of using natural resources sustainably, looking after the environment and educating people about geological hazards (e.g., floods, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions).These attributes position geoparks as vehicles for more respectful and purposeful travel.

Each geopark begins with the rock beneath your feet. Or, in the case of Charlevoix, rock from outer space.

Some 400 million years ago, a meteorite 4.5 kilometres across and weighing 15 billion tonnes slammed into what is now the Charlevoix region. Remains of the 54-kilometre-wide impact crater are still apparent in geomorphology that puts Baie-Saint-Paul at the mouth of a valley created on the crater’s west side, La Malbaie at the eastern margin and the mountainous jumble of Parc national des Grand-Jardins on its northern rim.

Although the now heavily eroded impact site — “astrobleme” to geologists — lies within the larger Charlevoix UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, a grassroots local group hopes to make it the centrepiece of a new initiative: Géoparc de Charlevoix.

Of 213 UNESCO global geoparks scattered across 48 countries, Canada hosts five: Discovery on Newfoundland’s Bonavista Peninsula, with its stunning examples of the planet’s first multicellular animals; Nova Scotia’s Cliffs of Fundy with its extreme tides, Carboniferous fossils and record of ancient supercontinent Pangea; Stonehammer in southern New Brunswick, highlighting the closing and opening of ancient oceans and a geological record from Precambrian to Pleistocene; Tumbler Ridge in northern B.C., with fossil riches spanning Cambrian stromatolites to Triassic fishes to Cretaceous dinosaurs and their trackways; and Quebec’s Percé, at the tip of Gaspé Peninsula, home of the eponymous postcard rock and a half-billion-year slice of Earth history.

A vibrant tourism destination in its own right, Percé is where I was eventually headed, but I was intrigued to learn more about Géoparc de Charlevoix’s UNESCO aspirations en route. Some 90 per cent of Charlevoix’s population lives within the astrobleme, so I’d had no trouble finding a comfortable base to tumble into bed with food-induced dreams of meteorite mayhem.

Though mere conceptual designations that neither claim land, nor impinge on rights or titles, nor erect barriers to development, geoparks’ multi-stakeholder touristic and educational aspects require some level of organization. In Charlevoix that’s general manager Félicia Corbeil-L’abbé, whom I meet next morning at the geopark’s visitor centre, an old converted golf clubhouse.

Inside, wood-panelled walls are ringed with museum-style interpretive displays and geologic samples, including chunks of meteorite and shatter cones — rock containing fan-like radiations documenting the impact forces that travelled through it. The room’s focal point is a massive 3D topographic model dominated by the astrobleme, where Corbeil-L’abbé uses fancy tech to bring me up to speed on regional geology.

The majority is Canadian Shield — igneous and metamorphic rock up to a billion years old that formed the roots of the once-immense Laurentian Mountains. Atop it lie areas of 450-million-year-old marine sediments of the St. Lawrence Platform. Finally, just offshore, are shards of the Appalachian Mountains — also ancient seabed rock but formed thousands of kilometres away some 50 million years prior and pushed into the Shield along an ancient fault. All, of course, secondarily broken, bruised, bent and boosted in every direction by the meteorite impact to create new structures, themselves subjected to tectonic folding, repeated scraping by advancing and retreating Pleistocene icesheets and waterborne deposition and erosion.

Given such a dynamic history, it’s a wonder there’s anything left to see, yet the astrobleme’s continued prominence suggests how those original impact structures — caused not by the meteorite but the explosion it generated — must have been significant. To visualize what these might have looked like, onto the astrobleme model Corbeil-L’abbé projects a similar-sized crater from the moon — where there are no plate tectonics, glaciation or water. The result is eye-opening: a perfectly round, steep-rimmed crater with a significantly raised centre surrounded by subtle concentric rings — like a slow-motion film of a drop of water hitting the surface of a pond but frozen in time.

It’s one thing to ogle virtual recreations of the geologic past, quite another to unpack them on the ground 400 million years later. But that’s precisely the role geosites serve, and so out the door we go, joined by retired geologist Pierre Verpaelst and naturalist Étienne Govare. With Corbeil-L’abbé at the wheel, we head north, immediately forsaking highway for country lane. “Main roads have the iconic views, but backroads are much more interesting and give you a sense of the territory,” she says.

I’m all for it, yet Charlevoix’s verdant, rolling hills seem nothing but bucolic. With no immediately recognizable aspects of a cataclysmic past, I imagine visitors having no idea the land they traverse is one of the largest impact sites on Earth.

Our first stop, a bloom of rock concealed by bushes, was stumbled upon by a geologist searching for mineral resources; instead, he found something more interesting — prominent groups of striations spreading through the bedrock, the defining characteristic of shatter cones. Shatter cones are also apparent at a hilltop outcrop where a commemorative plexiglass plaque identifies it as the location of the actual astrobleme discovery.

We turn our attention from looking down to looking up. As we drop from a raised area to a lower elevation then climb again, my geofolk mentors remind me of the water-drop analogy — the raised centre and concentric rings that quickly dissipate. The titanic forces of a meteorite impact will make even the hardest rock behave like liquid, creating structural artifacts that, unlike water, become frozen in time. The highest point of the astrobleme’s central uplift is 769 metres, though the actual rise is obscured in places. As we come off its northern edge, the bottom drops out of the land, and higher mountains ringing the crater’s northern edge tower ahead like a wall guarding some kind of Emerald City.

Several hours later, after a sweaty hike to a summit geosite in Parc national des Grands-Jardins, we revel in a stunning view that shows not only where we’ve been but the real-life version of the visitor centre’s topographic model.

Ultimately, Verpaelst explains, rock in the bottom of a concentric ring created by impact would be protected, while material thrust higher up on intervening ridges would eventually fall into these, obscuring much of the relief. This becomes even clearer at an overlook of Baie-Saint-Paul. Gazing over the bay’s wide expanse, mudflats of the Rivière du Gouffre and steep mountains backstop, Govare explains how this visage is essentially a postcard palimpsest: the meteor-blasted bedrock is now buried 200 metres below the delta by glacial, river and marine sediments that left a series of unstable benches on the hillside — one reason for the region’s frequent landslides. The layers of limestone bordering the highway behind us are no longer horizontal but tilted upwards, first by impact then the slow, hundred-million-year roll of folding and faulting. “This valley is a beautiful trap for the erosion story,” enthuses Govare, who later, over lunch, produces an explanatory back-of-the-napkin diagram so detailed that Verpaelst insists on photographing it for interpretive posterity.

This disarming exchange between professionals channels the essence of the global geopark movement — sharing knowledge. “Not just one-on-one, but through an international network that spreads information to all, so everyone can celebrate where they live in as many ways as possible — geo-foods, geo-tourism, geo-activities and geo-education,” says Corbeil-L’abbé.

In addition to Charlevoix, four other regions sanctioned by the Canadian Geoparks Network are queuing for UNESCO status: western Newfoundland’s Cabox, where the Earth’s mantle rode up over the continental margin during the subduction associated with the orogeny, or building, of the Appalachian Mountains; the Ontario pair of Niagara, with its fascinating escarpment and eponymous falls, plus Georgian Bay, whose island-constellated shoreline exposes two billion years of diverse geology; and Fire & Ice in B.C.’s spectacular Coast Range, with its end-to-end story of mountain building, glacio-volcanism and landscape collapses that help make the province a natural-disaster theme park.

Each sees a UNESCO global geopark as a means to connect their region’s geological story to its biological and human stories. By educating through outreach and geo-tourism (e.g., hiking, rafting, skiing, paddling) geoparks seek to build a bridge between ivory tower science, commercial enterprises and the public, fostering interest and stewardship in local geology and, where necessary, making people aware of its hazards.

In other words, it’s not just about a pretty picture — not that a pretty picture won’t get your attention.

At 3:58 a.m. the sky above Percé Rock is ablaze, the open North Atlantic on which it flames preternaturally calm. Fifteen minutes later, the sun rises, and I watch smouldering celestial embers dissolve into the sea from my balcony at Hôtel le Mirage — aptly named given the monolith’s reputation for shifting colours throughout the day, looming as a phantom during storms, even presenting as a ship.

Twenty-four hours earlier I was asleep in La Malbaie, awaiting my alarm to catch a ferry across the St. Lawrence to Rimouski. It had been another bluebird day, cool marine air blunting summer heat and spouts of invisible whales on the horizon. On deck, mid-river, I’d spun to take in what 16th-century French mariners who sailed this waterway saw: precipitous mountains lining the north shore, others rippling to the south. What did they think of this vast wilderness, familiar to its First Nations inhabitants for millennia but so strange to European sensibilities? Hard to say, but surmounting the peaks and searching for mineral wealth and the best places to grow food were doubtless on the agenda.

The subsequent drive to Percé had been long but picturesque, transiting lighthouses, coves and quaint villages, followed by forest, sea cliffs and rock-cuts through wildly folded sediments — like ice-cream cake that had melted then refrozen. I’d turned south at Forillon National Park, cutting inland across the peninsula and catching dinner in the seaside town of Gaspé. Late in the evening, as I rounded Pointe Saint-Pierre, Percé Rock took shape in the dusk, a full moon shimmering in the stillness of ocean between us.

A historic and natural icon visited by some 400,000 each year, “pierced rock” is the focus of Géoparc de Percé, whose sedimentary exposures span the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian and Carboniferous periods. A massive, steep-sided sea-stack of siliceous Devonian limestone over 400 million years old, Percé Rock was cast adrift from the coast by the breaking of strata as the Appalachians crumpled into existence. Standing 88 metres high, with a 20-metre arch and obelisk at one end, it has fossils from some 150 known species embedded within its matrix. Exposed to the full force of the sea, the wave-racked cliffs lose 300 tonnes of rocks each year, which explains some oddities of recorded history.

When Jacques Cartier sailed through in 1534, Percé Rock featured three holes through which the sea passed; by the time Champlain arrived in 1603 there was but one. In a mid-1700s illustration it sported two again, until one collapsed in 1845, leaving the sole arch visible today, destiny unknown. Future holes are being excavated on the rock’s seaward side, as I observe later that morning on a boat tour that begins with close-up views of the rock before peeling off toward its geologic associate in Parc national de Île-Bonaventure-et-du-Rocher-Percé.

Featuring the officialdom of borders and logos but no jurisdiction, geoparks don’t offer protections of their own, but require that significant conservation measures already exist — for which national and provincial parks handily serve. Created in 1985, Île-Bonaventure-et-du-Rocher-Percé’s original intent was to protect the biological heritage of internationally significant bird colonies on both structures. In doing so, it fortuitously preserved the interconnected geological heritage.

Here, where water-eroded caves riddle conglomerate bedrock with “bottomless holes,” we hike into the Magic Forest, a knot of eastern red cedar lining a small “graben” — a wedge of bedrock subsided between two faults. Along with ecosystem buddies moss and ferns, the cedars are here to the exclusion of other trees because of their tolerance for the water that flushes through such geologic sinks during heavy rains.

That night, in popular seafood restaurant La Maison du Pêcheur — an ode to Percé geo-foods with a lineup the second it opens — I overhear a man, newly arrived from New Jersey by motorhome, chatting up a tourist from the Netherlands. “That rock with the hole in it is pretty impressive,” he says.

Yet there’s so much more to this rock and its long, ever-shifting form — with a direct line from unfathomably old ocean-bottom sediment to human occupation of the land. It’s at this crossroads the geopark mission can enrich a visitor’s experience, sending buddy back to New Jersey with not only an understanding of deep-time Earth processes, but a much better story than just a cool, fenestrated rock.

Any lingering doubt over how rock safeguards tenets of our own existence is vanquished when I drive the south shore of Gaspé to a long-held bucket-list destination: Parc national de Miguasha. Miguasha is a UNESCO world heritage site important to both biologists and paleontologists as an international fossil destination of note — the world’s most outstanding example of the Devonian Age of Fishes.

The snapshot of life preserved in rich fossil beds exposed in a seaside cliff at Miguasha unfolded 370 million years ago in a tropical estuary, the horizon encircled by freshly risen Appalachian peaks more like the Rockies than their current rounded countenance. While scorpions and centipedes scuttled over primitive trees on land, a diversity of fishes plied the warm, intertidal waters. Though a few armour-plated forms had already been around several million years, a new tier of fish arose in their midst that could gulp air and crawl across mud flats in search of food — precursors to the beings that enabled our own existence. In 1881, the discovery of Eusthenopteron foordi, with its limb-like fins and gill-plus-lung respiratory system, solidified our modern conception of evolution from aquatic fish to land-dwelling tetrapod — the ultimate missing link in the Darwinian story. Seeing this long-revered organism in the visitor centre at Miguasha was edifying, walking the beach on which its discovery was made transformative. I choked up thinking: This is where we come from; our ancestors lived here.