The Nicodemus 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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84° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1953. Next is 82° in 2012.
Nicodemus’s center stands about 2,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,940 ft to 2,100 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
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 42×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Nicodemus reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Fork Solomon, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,050 river miles.
Lake on the way: Waconda Lake.
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 Nicodemus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Nicodemus has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Nicodemus normally reaches 57° and falls to 28°. The record high is 79°, in 1990; the record low 0°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.09 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1953 at Webster Dam, 11 miles east, 160 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
