Enrichments of iron, nickel, cobalt, and chromium found in impact melt samples suggest that the meteorite was chondritic in nature.

[4] Once largely unknown to the outside world, the lake-filled crater had long been known to local Inuit, who knew it as the "Crystal Eye of Nunavik" for its clear water.

[5] On June 20, 1943, a United States Army Air Force plane on a meteorological flight over the Ungava region of Quebec Province took a photograph that showed the wide crater rim rising up above the landscape.

In 1948, the Royal Canadian Air Force covered the same remote area as part of its program of photomapping Canada, though these photographs were not made publicly available until 1950.

[6] Attempts to find fragments of nickel-iron from the meteorite using mine detectors lent by the US Army were unsuccessful due to the area's granite containing high levels of magnetite.

A magnetometer survey did find a magnetic anomaly under the crater's northern rim, however, indicating that a large mass of metal-bearing material was buried below the surface.

Petrographic analysis of this sample was conducted at the Harvard – Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and reported to the 51st Meteoritical Society in 1988 by Ursula Marvin and David Kring.