The Buck Creek 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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5° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1944. Next is 9° in 1986.
Buck Creek’s center stands about 660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 520 ft to 710 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows New Albany Shale (black-shale), from the Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 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 63×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million 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 Buck Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Buck Creek, the Wabash, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,420 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Buck Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Buck Creek has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Buck Creek normally reaches 51° and falls to 33°. The record high is 75°, in 1971; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.31 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1944 at Lafayette Purdue University Airport, 11 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
