The Elm Creek 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
−9° on Nov. 16, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is −3° in 2019.
Elm Creek’s center stands about 1,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,220 ft to 1,340 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sioux Quartzite (quartzite, mudstone), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion 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.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 0.5 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 Elm Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elm Creek, the Blue Earth, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,070 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Elm Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Elm Creek has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Elm Creek normally reaches 42° and falls to 23°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low −1°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.44 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Lakefield 2 NE, 17 miles west, 230 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
