The Silver 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 1896. Next is 74° in 1971.
Silver Lake’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wabash Formation (limestone, dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 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 Silver Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of Silver Creek, the Eel, 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 Silver Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Silver Lake has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 40 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Silver Lake normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 73°, in 1955; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.32 in, fell in 1959.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Warsaw, 13 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.