The Strathcona 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.
63° on Nov. 16, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1957. Next is 62° in 2025.
Strathcona’s center stands about 1,120 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,090 ft to 1,170 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gabbro, peridotite, pyroxenite, lamprophyre, and metamorphic equivalents, 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.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gabbro, peridotite, pyroxenite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Archean. 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.
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 Strathcona reaches Hudson Bay by way of the South Branch Two Rivers, the Two Rivers, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 910 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: 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 Strathcona; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Strathcona has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about −3° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Strathcona normally reaches 36° and falls to 20°. The record high is 62°, in 2025; the record low −4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.35 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1957 at Agassiz Refuge, 19 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.