The Shelly 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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74° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 66° in 1923.
Shelly’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 880 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mafic metavolcanic rocks (metabasalt, greenstone), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Age: Precambrian. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 Shelly reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Marsh, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,010 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Shelly; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shelly has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Shelly normally reaches 37° and falls to 19°. The record high is 67°, in 1953; the record low −20°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 0.46 in, fell in 1971.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Ada, 18 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
