The Ellsworth 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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0° on Nov. 13, 1940, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1904. Next is 1° in 1932.
Ellsworth’s center stands about 1,560 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,520 ft to 1,670 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
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 55×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Ellsworth reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,910 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ellsworth; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ellsworth has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Ellsworth normally reaches 57° and falls to 30°. The record high is 79°, in 1988; the record low 2°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.87 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 at Ellsworth, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
