The Artas 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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Partly cloudy
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73° on Nov. 15, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1877. Next is 69° in 2005.
Artas’s center stands about 1,810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,790 ft to 2,010 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale (shale, bentonite), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 45×. 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, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.6 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 Artas reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,440 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sharpe, Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Artas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Artas has a dry-winter warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 2° in January. A normal year brings about 44 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Artas normally reaches 39° and falls to 19°. The record high is 67°, in 1990; the record low −23°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.12 in, fell in 2003.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1877 at Eureka, 12 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
