The Altamont 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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83° on Nov. 12, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 82° in 1999.
Altamont’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 860 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marmaton Group (shale, limestone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Altamont reaches the Gulf of America by way of Deer Creek, Hackberry Creek, Labette Creek, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,190 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Altamont; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Altamont has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 8 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Altamont normally reaches 57° and falls to 34°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.57 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Mound Valley 3 WSW, 9 miles west, 110 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
