The International 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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68° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 66° in 2001.
International Falls’s center stands about 1,130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,070 ft to 1,200 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic intrusion, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 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 8 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Banded-iron-formation. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.5 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 International Falls reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Rainy, the Winnipeg and the Nelson: about 920 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 International Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
International Falls has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about −6° in January. A normal year brings about 73 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 25 inches of water.
On November 14 International Falls normally reaches 35° and falls to 19°. The record high is 59°, in 2025; the record low −14°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the International Falls Area threaded record (International Falls International Airport, 3 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
