The De Soto 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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86° on Nov. 12, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1978. Next is 85° in 2011.
De Soto’s center stands about 310 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 370 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ocala Limestone, from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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.
Limestone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 De Soto reaches the Gulf of America by way of Chokee Creek, the Flint and the Apalachicola: about 250 river miles.
130 miles of the trip are on the Flint.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of De Soto; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
De Soto has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1978 at Crisp Co Power Dam, 10 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
