The McKeansburg 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.
19° on Nov. 11, 2017, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 19° in 2019.
McKeansburg’s center stands about 690 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 870 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bears Head, about 2,090 ft, 12 miles north-northwest.
The section below crosses 15 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. 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: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone, mudstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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. 9 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 McKeansburg reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Little Schuylkill, the Schuylkill and the Delaware: about 170 river miles.
100 miles of the trip are on the Schuylkill.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of McKeansburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
McKeansburg has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 27 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 52 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Lehighton 1 SSW, 20 miles east-northeast, 240 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.