The Three Oaks 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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4° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 6° in 2019.
Three Oaks’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 740 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Randall, about 820 ft, 8 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ellsworth Shale, from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. 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. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 Three Oaks reaches Lake Michigan by way of Deer Creek, the South Branch Galien and the Galien: about 12 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Three Oaks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Three Oaks has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 64 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Three Oaks normally reaches 48° and falls to 32°. The record high is 71°, in 1971; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the South Bend Area threaded record (South Bend Airport, 17 miles east-southeast, 100 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
