The Shellsburg 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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76° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 75° in 1941.
Shellsburg’s center stands about 780 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 760 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cedar Valley Group (limestone, dolostone), from the Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 431 to 440 million years old. About 1 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 Shellsburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bear Creek, the Cedar River, the Iowa and the Mississippi: about 1,540 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Shellsburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shellsburg has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Shellsburg normally reaches 45° and falls to 26°. The record high is 73°, in 1950; the record low 1°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Vinton, 8 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
