The Black Springs 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
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5.03 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1872. The next wettest, 4.22 inches, fell in 1958.
Black Springs’s center stands about 730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 1,000 ft, a difference of 320 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hurricane Knob, about 2,150 ft, 15 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Womble Shale (Middle Ordovician) (black-shale), from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 19×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Chert, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Novaculite. Age: Late Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 384 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Black-shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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. 2 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 Black Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Caddo, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 630 river miles.
Lake on the way: De Gray Lake.
360 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Black Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Black Springs has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Black Springs normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.82 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 from the Mount Ida Area threaded record (Mount Ida, 10 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
