The Sparta 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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77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 76° in 1994.
Sparta’s center stands about 1,360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,240 ft to 1,420 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Maxville Limestone; Rushville, Logan, and Cuyhoga Formations, Undivided (shale, siltstone, sandstone), from the Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 43×. 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, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 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 Sparta reaches the Gulf of America by way of Dry Creek, the Kokosing, the Walhonding, the Muskingum, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,950 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sparta; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sparta has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sparta normally reaches 51° and falls to 32°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 4°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.20 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Centerburg 2 SE, 8 miles south-southeast, 160 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
