The Van Buren 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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1° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 5° in 1959.
Van Buren’s center stands about 850 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 890 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
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: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 Van Buren reaches the Gulf of America by way of Black Creek, the Salamonie, the Wabash, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,520 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 Van Buren; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Van Buren has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Van Buren normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 74°, in 1931; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.63 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Marion 2 N, 8 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
