The Morken 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Chance of showers
73° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 68° in 1934.
Morken’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 890 ft to 910 ft, a difference of 20 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mafic metavolcanic rocks (metabasalt, greenstone), 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.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gabbro, peridotite, pyroxenite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Age: Precambrian. About 0.6 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 Morken reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Buffalo, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,080 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
420 miles of the trip are on the Red River of the North.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Morken; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morken has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 0° in January. A normal year brings about 51 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 Morken normally reaches 39° and falls to 22°. The record high is 66°, in 1939; the record low −9°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 1.26 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 from the Fargo Area threaded record (Fargo Hector International Airport, 11 miles southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
