The Clarkson 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
−4° on Nov. 16, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 3° in 1997.
Clarkson’s center stands about 1,520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,460 ft to 1,680 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carlile Shale, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 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 59×. 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. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 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 Clarkson reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Fork Maple Creek, Maple Creek, the Elkhorn, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,880 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 Clarkson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clarkson has a dry-winter hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Howells, 6 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
