The Oil Trough 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
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
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5.55 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1884. The next wettest, 4.38 inches, fell in 1958.
Oil Trough’s center stands about 240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 430 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Uncle Joe Warren Mountain, about 910 ft, 6 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium - Alluvial deposits of local streams or of overbank flow of major streams (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 30×. 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: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone. 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.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.9 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 Oil Trough reaches the Gulf of America by way of Departee Creek, the White River and the Mississippi: about 860 river miles.
620 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Oil Trough; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oil Trough has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Oil Trough normally reaches 59° and falls to 41°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 18°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.34 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1884 at Newport, 11 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
