The Malta 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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74° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is 73° in 1989.
Malta’s center stands about 920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 860 ft to 920 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Platteville Group (dolostone, limestone), from the Late Ordovician, 454 to 459 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.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 459 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 454 to 468 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 454 to 459 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 3 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 Malta reaches the Gulf of America by way of Killbuck Creek, the Rock River and the Mississippi: about 1,620 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Malta; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Malta has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 33 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Malta normally reaches 47° and falls to 30°. The record high is 73°, in 1999; the record low 2°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.34 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at De Kalb, 4 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
