The Columbia 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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22° on Nov. 15, 1969, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1957. Next is 24° in 1973.
Columbia’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 190 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Peedee Formation - Black Creek Group, undivided (clay, sand), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 54×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay, sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Slate. Age: Middle Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 521 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Columbia reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Gills Creek, the Congaree, the Santee and the South Santee: about 190 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lib Pines Lake.
70 miles of the trip are on the Santee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbia has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Columbia normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 82°, in 1989; the record low 24°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.10 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1957 at Sandhill Research - Elgin, 7 miles north-northeast, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
