The Elk 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
74° on Nov. 11, 2024, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1978. Next is 72° in 1993.
Elk’s center stands about 460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 230 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows "Glenarm Wissahickon" formation (mica-schist), from the Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mica-schist. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Mica-schist, quartzite. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gneiss, quartz-diorite, granodiorite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Middle Cambrian, 500 to 600 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Muscovite-schist. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Elk reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Little Elk Creek, Big Elk Creek and the Elk River: about 30 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Elk; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Elk has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Elk normally reaches 54° and falls to 33°. The record high is 72°, in 1993; the record low 15°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.92 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1978 at Octoraro Lake, 8 miles west-northwest, 200 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
