Where your water goes

Rain that falls on Saskatoon ends up in Hudson Bay

1. Your sub-basin

   Lower South Saskatchewan

2. then

   Nelson River

3. It arrives here

   Hudson Bay

An enormous, cold, inland sea is the destination — water from here flows north rather than south, which surprises most people who look at a map for the first time. It is ice-covered for much of the year, so the whole system is on a short, violent, snowmelt-driven schedule.

Basin 05H (Canadian sub-drainage area)

Under your feet

Saskatoon sits on sandstone

About 101 million years old — from the age of the dinosaurs.

All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →

1. At the surface101 million years oldSours the soil

   Sandstone

   Mesozoic sedimentary rocks · Late Cretaceous

   What it is

   Sand grains, mostly quartz, stuck together by a natural cement of silica, calcite or iron oxide. Rub a weathered face and grains come off on your hand.

   How it wears

   Crumbles back into sand along its bedding, and leaves overhangs and shelters where a soft layer sits beneath a hard one. Iron-cemented sandstone weathers to rust red.

   What it means above ground

   Sandy, quick-draining, usually acid soil. Sandstone is porous, so it stores groundwater and releases it steadily — sandstone country has reliable springs where the water table meets the hillside.

2. Below, layer 291 million years oldSweetens the soil

   Chalk

   Late Cretaceous sedimentary · Campanian

   What it is

   An exceptionally pure limestone, built almost entirely from the microscopic calcite plates of single-celled algae. Nothing coarse got in because there was no land close enough to supply it.