The Silver Bay 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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−7° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1993. Next is −4° in 1995.
Silver Bay’s center stands about 760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 1,510 ft, a difference of 920 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mariner Mountain, about 1,260 ft, 2 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Diabase and ferrodiorite (mafic-hypabyssal, diorite), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.2 billion 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 15×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basalt. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Gabbro. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.2 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Felsic-hypabyssal, granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.2 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Volcanic. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mafic-hypabyssal, diorite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.2 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.
Rain that falls on Silver Bay runs straight into Lake Superior. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Silver Bay; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Silver Bay has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 76° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. A normal year brings about 94 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 Silver Bay normally reaches 36° and falls to 22°. The record high is 65°, in 1999; the record low 1°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 2010.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1993 at Wolf Ridge Elc, 7 miles north-northeast, 680 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
