The Slate Islands are a small archipelago in Lake Superior, Ontario, Canada, about 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) south of the town of Terrace Bay.

The islands remoteness is enforced by almost 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) of open, wild, Lake Superior water and its distance from any large communities.

Caribou reached the highest population density in the world on the islands before the 1990s, with the herd estimated at 650 animals.

[7] Wolves reached the archipelago in the early 1990s, preying heavily on the caribou, but for reasons not entirely understood, they disappeared a few years later.

Mammals found on the islands include woodland caribou, grey wolf, beaver, muskrat, snowshoe hare, red fox, meadow jumping mouse, and little brown bat.

[3] Bird species include American bittern, bald eagle, Canada goose, common loon, great blue heron, grey jay, herring gull, red-breasted merganser, and peregrine falcon.

[3] The cooling effect of Lake Superior makes the Slate Islands a particularly harsh habitat for its latitude.

[9] Also located in the islands are good examples of shatter cones, rare geological features formed in bedrock by the high velocity shock waves created by meteorite impacts.

They have a distinctively conical shape with thin grooves (striae) that radiate from the top (apex) of the cone.

The Slate Islands are home to a shatter cone measuring 9 m (30 ft), one of the largest examples in the world (pictured here).