The Dow City 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Dow City’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,110 ft to 1,410 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dakata and Windrow Formations (sandstone, shale), from the Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 113 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 48×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 113 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 315 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 315 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 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 Dow City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Boyer, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,830 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dow City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
