The Thorntown 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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4° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1914. Next is 4° in 2019.
Thorntown’s center stands about 860 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 900 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Borden Group (siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 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 Thorntown reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sugar Creek, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,400 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 Thorntown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Thorntown has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
On November 14 Thorntown normally reaches 51° and falls to 34°. The record high is 74°, in 1931; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.55 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1914 at Frankfort Disposal, 13 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
