The Stowe Prairie 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.
Stowe Prairie’s center stands about 1,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,350 ft to 1,490 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Schist of sedimentary protolith, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 8 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.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Archean to Paleoproterozoic. About 4 mi of the line.
Dioritic, granodiorite. Age: Archean to Paleoproterozoic. About 4 mi of the line.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Stowe Prairie reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Wing, the Leaf, the Redeye, the Crow Wing and the Mississippi: about 2,040 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Stowe Prairie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.