The Morrison Bluff 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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13° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 15° in 1940.
Morrison Bluff’s center stands about 380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 330 ft to 600 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Huckleberry Mountain, about 1,980 ft, 12 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Savanna Formation (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 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.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. 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 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, black-shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 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 Morrison Bluff reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cane Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 850 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 Morrison Bluff; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morrison Bluff 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 Morrison Bluff 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, 8 miles southwest, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
