The Mount Sterling 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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82° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 80° in 1958.
Mount Sterling’s center stands about 980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 870 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Westbrook Mountain, about 1,470 ft, 9 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ashlock Formation, Grant Lake and Calloway Creek Limestones, and Fairview Formation, undivided, from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 39×. 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, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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. 2 smaller units 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 Mount Sterling reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hinkston Creek, the South Fork Licking, the Licking, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,660 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 Mount Sterling; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mount Sterling has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Mount Sterling normally reaches 56° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 1927; the record low 8°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.17 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Mount Sterling, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
