The Alix 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.
13° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 15° in 1940.
Alix’s center stands about 380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 820 ft, a difference of 480 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Carter Mountain, about 2,170 ft, 13 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows McAlester Formation (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, black-shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Alix reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cedar Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 860 river miles.
Lake on the way: Murray Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Alix; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alix has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Alix normally reaches 62° and falls to 39°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 17°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.78 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Subiaco, 10 miles south-southeast, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.