The Burgess 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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12° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 14° in 1950.
Burgess’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Burgess reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Elm Branch, Dry Wood Creek, the Marmaton, the Little Osage, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,630 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Burgess; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Burgess has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Burgess normally reaches 58° and falls to 36°. The record high is 77°, in 2025; the record low 16°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 2.70 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Pittsburg, 12 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
