The Big Foot Prairie 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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75° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 71° in 1964.
Big Foot Prairie’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 910 ft to 1,170 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 59×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million 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 Big Foot Prairie reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lawrence Creek, Piscasaw Creek, the Kishwaukee, the Rock River and the Mississippi: about 1,640 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Foot Prairie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Big Foot Prairie has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 40 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Big Foot Prairie normally reaches 48° and falls to 31°. The record high is 70°, in 1971; the record low 8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.13 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Lake Geneva Wwtp, 12 miles northeast, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
