The Coldiron 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Coldiron’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,110 ft to 2,530 ft, a difference of 1,420 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Brush Mountain, about 3,390 ft, 13 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Breathitt Formation, lower part (shale, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 299 to 422 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 Coldiron reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,700 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Bards Lake, Lake Cumberland and Cordell Hull Reservoir.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Coldiron; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
