The Zurich 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. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 82° in 2016.
Zurich’s center stands about 2,220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,060 ft to 2,230 ft, a difference of 170 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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 56×. 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. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.8 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 Zurich reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sand Creek, the Saline, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,040 river miles.
Lake on the way: Wilson 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 Zurich; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Zurich has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Zurich normally reaches 55° and falls to 29°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low −8°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Plainville 4 WNW, 3 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
