Duluth is a port city in the U.S. state of Minnesota and the county seat of St. Louis County. Located on Lake Superior in Minnesota's Arrowhead Region, the city is a hub for cargo shipping. The population was 86,697 at the 2020 census, making it Minnesota's fifth-largest city. Duluth forms a metropolitan area with neighboring Superior, Wisconsin, called the Twin Ports. It is south of the Iron Range and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It is named after Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, the area's first known European explorer.
Trout Lake Township is located in north central Minnesota in Itasca County, United States. It is bordered by the City of Coleraine to the west and north, City of Bovey on the north, an unorganized township on the east, and Blackberry Township to the south. Town government was adopted on March 6, 1894. The population was 1,056 at the 2020 census.
Iron ores are rocks and minerals from which metallic iron can be economically extracted. The ores are usually rich in iron oxides and vary in color from dark grey, bright yellow, or deep purple to rusty red. The iron is usually found in the form of magnetite (Fe
3O
4, 72.4% Fe), hematite (Fe
2O
3, 69.9% Fe), goethite (FeO(OH), 62.9% Fe), limonite (FeO(OH)·n(H2O), 55% Fe), or siderite (FeCO3, 48.2% Fe).
The Mesabi Iron Range is a mining district and mountain range in northeastern Minnesota following an elongate trend containing large deposits of iron ore. It is the largest of four major iron ranges in the region collectively known as the Iron Range of Minnesota. First described in 1866, it is the chief iron ore mining district in the United States. The district is located largely in Itasca and Saint Louis counties. It has been extensively worked since 1892, and has seen a transition from high-grade direct shipping ores through gravity concentrates to the current industry exclusively producing iron ore (taconite) pellets. Production has been dominantly controlled by vertically integrated steelmakers since 1901, and therefore is dictated largely by US ironmaking capacity and demand.
Taconite is a variety of banded iron formation, an iron-bearing sedimentary rock, in which the iron minerals are interlayered with quartz, chert, or carbonate. The name taconyte was coined by Horace Vaughn Winchell (1865–1923) – son of Newton Horace Winchell, the Minnesota state geologist – during their pioneering investigations of the Precambrian Biwabik Iron Formation of northeastern Minnesota. He believed the sedimentary rock sequence hosting the iron-formation was correlative with the Taconic orogeny of New England, and referred to the unfamiliar and as-yet-unnamed iron-bearing rock as the 'taconic rock' or taconyte.
The University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) is a public university in Duluth, Minnesota, United States. It is part of the University of Minnesota system. UMD offers 17 bachelor's degrees in 87 majors, graduate programs in 24 different fields, a two-year program at the School of Medicine, and a four-year College of Pharmacy program.
The Iron Range is collectively or individually a number of elongated iron-ore mining districts around Lake Superior in the United States and Canada. Much of the ore-bearing region lies alongside the range of granite hills formed by the Giants Range batholith. These cherty iron ore deposits are Precambrian in the Vermilion Range and middle Precambrian in the Mesabi and Cuyuna ranges, all in Minnesota. The Gogebic Range in Wisconsin and the Marquette Iron Range and Menominee Range in Michigan have similar characteristics and are of similar age. Natural ores and concentrates were produced from 1848 until the mid-1950s, when taconites and jaspers were concentrated and pelletized, and started to become the major source of iron production.
The Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway (DM&IR), informally known as the Missabe Road, was a railroad operating in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin that used to haul iron ore and later taconite to the Great Lakes ports of Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota. Control of the railway was acquired on May 10, 2004, by the Canadian National Railway (CN) when it purchased the assets of Great Lakes Transportation.
The Vermilion Range exists between Tower, Minnesota and Ely, Minnesota, and contains significant deposits of iron ore. Together with the Mesabi, Gunflint, and Cuyuna ranges, these four constitute the Iron Ranges of northern Minnesota. While the Mesabi Range had iron ore close enough to the surface to enable pit mining, mines had to be dug deep underground to reach the ore of the Vermilion and Cuyuna ranges. The Soudan mine was nearly 1/2 mile underground and required blasting of Precambrian sedimentary bedrock.
The North Shore of Lake Superior runs from Duluth, Minnesota, United States, at the western end of the lake, to Thunder Bay and Nipigon, Ontario, Canada, in the north, to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in the east. The shore is characterized by alternating rocky cliffs and cobblestone beaches, with forested hills and ridges through which scenic rivers and waterfalls descend as they flow to Lake Superior.
The geology of Minnesota comprises the rock, minerals, and soils of the U.S. state of Minnesota, including their formation, development, distribution, and condition.
The economy of Minnesota produced US$472 billion of gross domestic product in 2023. Minnesota headquartered 15 Fortune 500 companies in 2023, the largest of which were UnitedHealth Group (5th) and Target (33rd). The per capita personal income in 2022 was $60,785, ranking ninth in the nation. The median household income in 2023 was $82,338.
Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. is an American steel manufacturer based in Cleveland, Ohio. They specialize in the mining, beneficiation, and pelletizing of iron ore, as well as steelmaking, including stamping and tooling. The company was the world's 25th-largest steel producer and the third-largest in the United States in 2022. It is the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America.
Natural resource economics deals with the supply, demand, and allocation of the Earth's natural resources. One main objective of natural resource economics is to better understand the role of natural resources in the economy in order to develop more sustainable methods of managing those resources to ensure their availability for future generations. Resource economists study interactions between economic and natural systems, with the goal of developing a sustainable and efficient economy.
The Duluth Air Defense Sector (DUADS) is an inactive United States Air Force organization. Its last assignment was with the Air Defense Command 29th Air Division, being stationed at Duluth Airport, Minnesota. It was inactivated on 1 April 1969.
The Taconite State Trail extends 165 miles from Grand Rapids, Minnesota to Ely, Minnesota and intersects the Arrowhead State Trail west of Lake Vermilion. On the Grand Rapids end, the trail is paved for the first 6 miles for in-line skating and biking. The rest of the trail is natural surface used primarily in the winter months for snowmobiling. In the summer, several areas contain standing water, but some areas are suitable for horseback riding, hiking, and mountain biking
The University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources is the agricultural and environmental sciences college of the University of Maryland and operates the Maryland Sea Grant College in cooperation with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Oliver Iron Mining Company was a mining company operating in Minnesota, United States. It was one of the most prominent companies in the early decades of mining on the Mesabi Range. As a division of U.S. Steel, Oliver dwarfed its competitors—in 1920, it operated 128 mines across the region, while its largest competitor operated only 65.
Elcor is a ghost town, or more properly, an extinct town, in the U.S. state of Minnesota that was inhabited between 1897 and 1956. It was built on the Mesabi Iron Range near the city of Gilbert in St. Louis County. Elcor was its own unincorporated community before it was abandoned and was never a neighborhood proper of the city of Gilbert. Not rating a figure in the national census, the people of Elcor were only generally considered to be citizens of Gilbert. The area where Elcor was located was annexed by Gilbert when its existing city boundaries were expanded after 1969.
Iron mining in the United States produced 48 million metric tons of iron ore in 2019. Iron ore was the third-highest-value metal mined in the United States, after gold and copper. Iron ore was mined from nine active mines and three reclamation operations in Michigan, Minnesota, and Utah. Most of the iron ore was mined in northern Minnesota's Mesabi Range. Net exports were 3.9 million tons. US iron ore made up 2.5 percent of the total mined worldwide in 2015. Employment as of 2014 was 5,750 in iron mines and iron ore treatment plants.
