The Cotton 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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−13° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is −12° in 1986.
Cotton’s center stands about 1,330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,310 ft to 1,390 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Slate and graywacke (slate, graywacke), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old.
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.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 24 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 Cotton reaches Lake Superior by way of Jenkins Creek, the Whiteface and the Saint Louis: about 100 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
65 miles of the trip are on the Saint Louis.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cotton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cotton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cotton normally reaches 35° and falls to 18°. The record high is 62°, in 1953; the record low −5°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.79 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 from the Hibbing Area threaded record (Hibbing Chisholm Hibbing Airport, 22 miles northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
