The Swifton 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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83° on Nov. 15, 1964, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 82° in 1989.
Swifton’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 240 ft to 270 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mixed-clastic, carbonate. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.6 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 Swifton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Maple Ditch, Village Creek, the White River and the Mississippi: about 900 river miles.
620 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Swifton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Swifton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Swifton normally reaches 58° and falls to 39°. The record high is 81°, in 1964; the record low 18°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.48 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Alicia 2 NNE, 8 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
