The Athens 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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69° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 68° in 1964.
Athens’s center stands about 1,410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,310 ft to 1,480 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Felsic metavolcanic rocks of 1835- to 1845-Ma age group (rhyolite, dacite), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 1.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 56×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 1.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 1.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Alkali-feldspar-granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 0.4 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 Athens reaches the Gulf of America by way of Black Creek, the Big Rib, the Wisconsin and the Mississippi: about 1,910 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Petenwell Lake, Lake Wisconsin, Lake Du Bay and Wisconsin River Flowage 4964.
1,610 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Athens; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Athens has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 64 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Athens normally reaches 41° and falls to 26°. The record high is 64°, in 1990; the record low −2°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Wausau Area threaded record (Wausau Asos, 23 miles east-southeast, 210 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
