ETC was created by people who opposed the hardfork that ETH just completed. I heard that some ETH miners with considerable hashing power were trying to bring down the ETC project.
Its amazing that only yesterday 1 ETC was around $0.60 and now its around $2.25.
ETC wasn't created recently, it's simply the original Ethereum blockchain that existed before the hard fork. A lot of people are apparently unhappy with the hard fork to bail out DAO users.