The Mount Olive 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
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87° on Nov. 14, 2024, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 84° in 1958.
Mount Olive’s center stands about 850 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 1,140 ft, a difference of 460 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rebecca Mountain, about 1,540 ft, 6 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Higgins Ferry Group; Roscoelite-graphite-quartz schist and graphitic quartzite (quartzite, schist), from the Precambrian to Paleozoic.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 15×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Quartzite, schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 5 mi of the line.
Phyllite, metaclastic. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mica-schist, phyllite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 2 mi of the line.
Leucocratic-granitic. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Mount Olive reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Hatchet Creek, the Coosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 440 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 Mount Olive; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mount Olive has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Mount Olive normally reaches 65° and falls to 39°. The record high is 87°, in 2024; the record low 17°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.42 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Sylacauga 4 NE, 10 miles north-northwest, 350 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
