The Kirkland 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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75° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 69° in 1948.
Kirkland’s center stands about 530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 490 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 490 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Hunger, about 1,970 ft, 13 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Frankfort Formation (siltstone, shale), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Devonian, 388 to 394 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 388 to 410 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone, shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 428 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. 3 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Kirkland reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Mohawk and the Hudson: about 280 river miles.
160 miles of the trip are on the Hudson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Kirkland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kirkland has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Trenton Falls, 18 miles northeast, 270 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
