The Carthage 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
80° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 78° in 1999.
Carthage’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 610 ft to 700 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Meppen Limestone, Fern Glen Formation, and Burlington-Keokuk Limestone, from the Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 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: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 0.8 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 Carthage reaches the Gulf of America by way of Prairie Creek, the La Moine, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,370 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Carthage; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Carthage has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Carthage normally reaches 52° and falls to 33°. The record high is 78°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.13 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Bentley, 5 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
