The Bearden 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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16° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 20° in 1911.
Bearden’s center stands about 240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 170 ft to 320 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 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 Bearden reaches the Gulf of America by way of Freeo Creek, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 530 river miles.
300 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bearden; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bearden has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Bearden normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 16°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.00 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Fordyce, 14 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
