Northwest Territories · Boreal North & Taiga · basalt country
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Northeastern Great Slave Lake
then
Mackenzie River
It arrives here
Arctic Ocean
North, to a frozen ocean, through country where the ground itself is still partly frozen. Rivers on this side run hard for a few weeks after break-up and quietly the rest of the year, and they are getting longer summers than they used to.
Basin 07S (Canadian sub-drainage area)
The river right now
114%
of the ten-year median for this date · 49.6 m³/s against 43.4 normally
normalAbout what it should be for the date. The river is doing its ordinary work — sorting gravel, feeding its banks and moving fish around at the pace everything in it is adapted to. It is rising — about 32% more water by the end of the week.
Under your feet
About 2.8 billion years old — older than free oxygen in the air, and older than almost any fossil.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Archean volcanic rocks · Neoarchean
Igneous: extrusive; Extrusive: mafic · Neoarchean
Bedrock and soil figures are modelled from national geological surveys and global soil mapping, at a resolution of a few hundred metres — right for the shape of a district, not for a particular garden. River discharge is modelled, not gauged. For anything that matters, dig a hole and look.
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Neoarchean sedimentary · Neoarchean
The soil it made
What that means
Easy ground for most vegetables and fruit. Iron and manganese start to get harder to reach at the top of this band, which shows up as yellowing between the veins on young leaves.
Happy here without a fight
Brassicas, beets, spinach, peas, lilacs, clematis and most herbs. Hydrangeas come out pink.
If you want the rest
Leave it. If acid-lovers are the point, grow them in containers or a made-up bed rather than fighting the whole garden.
Working it
Fine and fertile, holding water better than sand without clay's stickiness. It caps over in heavy rain, so it wants a mulch or a cover crop rather than being left bare.