The Scandia 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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80° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 78° in 2021.
Scandia’s center stands about 1,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,420 ft to 1,540 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), 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 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.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Scandia reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,830 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 Scandia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Scandia has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 30 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Scandia normally reaches 55° and falls to 31°. The record high is 73°, in 2025; the record low 6°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.27 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Courtland, 6 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
