The Taconite 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, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1915. Next is 67° in 1953.
Taconite’s center stands about 1,350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,290 ft to 1,530 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blueberry Hill, about 1,520 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Coleraine Formation (conglomerate, lignite, sandstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 94 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Banded-iron-formation, sedimentary-breccia. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 2 billion years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Quartzite, conglomerate, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, lignite, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 94 to 100 million years old. About 2 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 Taconite reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Swan River and the Mississippi: about 2,170 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Taconite; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Taconite has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −1° in January. A normal year brings about 60 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 Taconite normally reaches 37° and falls to 21°. The record high is 65°, in 1953; the record low −9°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.54 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 at Grand Rapids Forestry Lab, 7 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
