The Cibola 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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93° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 90° in 1973.
Cibola’s center stands about 230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 220 ft to 450 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mohave Peak, about 2,700 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene river alluvium (sand, gravel), from the Holocene, less than 10,000 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 10×. 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. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Diorite, alkali-granite, granodiorite. Age: Early Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 150 to 180 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Cibola reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Colorado: about 190 river miles.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cibola; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cibola has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 108° in July; winter nights fall to about 42° in December. About 4 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cibola normally reaches 78° and falls to 50°. The record high is 91°, in 1999; the record low 32°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.87 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Blythe Asos, 17 miles north, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
