The Shetek 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
79° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 74° in 1953.
Shetek’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. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Poverty Hill, about 1,730 ft, 9 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undifferentiated (conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 36×. 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 21 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 3 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 Shetek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Plum Creek, the Cottonwood, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,080 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 Shetek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shetek has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 Shetek normally reaches 42° and falls to 25°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low −10°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 1983.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Tracy, 6 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
