The Middlesborough 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is 76° in 1993.
Middlesborough’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,130 ft to 2,450 ft, a difference of 1,320 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Brush Mountain, about 3,390 ft, 10 miles east-northeast.
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 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.
Conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1.0 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 Middlesborough reaches the Gulf of America by way of Yellow Creek, 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 Middlesborough; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Middlesborough has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 8 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 55 inches of water.
On November 14 Middlesborough normally reaches 58° and falls to 31°. The record high is 75°, in 1989; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.58 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at Tazewell, 14 miles southeast, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
