The Marissa 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
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7° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 8° in 2019.
Marissa’s center stands about 460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, coal. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone, shale. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 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 Marissa reaches the Gulf of America by way of Doza Creek, the Kaskaskia and the Mississippi: about 1,120 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Marissa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Marissa has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
On November 14 Marissa normally reaches 59° and falls to 37°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.23 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Belleville Siu Research, 19 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
