The Big Falls plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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69° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1930. Next is 63° in 1934.
Big Falls’s center stands about 1,220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,180 ft to 1,270 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Biotite schist of graywacke protolith, and schist-rich migmatite (biotite-schist, migmatite), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Biotite-schist, migmatite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Migmatite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Big Falls reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Big Fork, the Rainy, the Winnipeg and the Nelson: about 960 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lakes on the way: Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Big Falls has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about −5° in January. About 27 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Big Falls normally reaches 34° and falls to 18°. The record high is 61°, in 2016; the record low −14°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.20 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1930 at Big Falls, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
