The Athens 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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79° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1879. Next is 78° in 1955.
Athens’s center stands about 610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 500 ft to 630 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Elkhart Hill, about 820 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Shelburn-Patoka Formations undivided (shale, limestone), from the Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, coal. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 million years old. About 9 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 Athens reaches the Gulf of America by way of Town Branch, the Sangamon, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,340 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Athens; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Athens has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 22 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Athens normally reaches 53° and falls to 35°. The record high is 78°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.91 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1879 from the Springfield Area threaded record (Springfield Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport, 8 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
