The Rockfield 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.
7° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 11° in 1911.
Rockfield’s center stands about 700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 550 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wabash Formation (limestone, dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 0.2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
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 Rockfield reaches the Gulf of America by way of Rock Creek, the Wabash, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,440 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 Rockfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rockfield has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Rockfield normally reaches 51° and falls to 33°. The record high is 76°, in 1909; the record low 9°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.59 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Logansport Cicott St., 12 miles northeast, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.