The Clanton 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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84° on Nov. 17, 1957, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 83° in 1924.
Clanton’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tuscaloosa Group; Coker Formation (sand, clay), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million 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 44×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Phyllite, metaclastic. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mica-schist, phyllite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 0.5 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 Clanton reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Poley Bridge Creek, Walnut Creek, the Coosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 420 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lay Lake.
310 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Clanton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clanton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 60 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Clanton normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 81°, in 1944; the record low 21°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.95 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Clanton, 2 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
