The Hartz Lake 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.
75° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 74° in 1911.
Hartz Lake’s center stands about 740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 710 ft to 790 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Muscatatuck Group (limestone, dolostone), from the Devonian, 359 to 422 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.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 7 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 Hartz Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Tippecanoe, the Wabash, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,500 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hartz Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hartz Lake has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 28 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Hartz Lake normally reaches 49° and falls to 32°. The record high is 68°, in 2011; the record low 11°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.43 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Knox Wwtp, 11 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.