The Sand Lake 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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Sand Lake’s center stands about 1,360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,310 ft to 1,490 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitoid intrusion (granitic), 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.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Archean. About 4 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. 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 Sand Lake reaches Hudson Bay by way of Portage Lake, the Bowstring, the Big Fork, the Rainy, the Winnipeg and the Nelson: about 1,090 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lakes on the way: Lake of the Woods, Portage Lake 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 Sand Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
