The Mortons Gap 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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10° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1946. Next is 10° in 2019.
Mortons Gap’s center stands about 470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 660 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ball Knob, about 730 ft, 14 miles southeast.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 56×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Mortons Gap reaches the Gulf of America by way of Flat Creek, the Pond, the Green River, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,260 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 Mortons Gap; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mortons Gap has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mortons Gap normally reaches 59° and falls to 40°. The record high is 77°, in 1990; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.70 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1946 at Madisonville, 8 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
