The Pikeville 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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18° on Nov. 15, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 22° in 1996.
Pikeville’s center stands about 690 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 660 ft to 1,640 ft, a difference of 980 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Abner Mountain, about 2,200 ft, 11 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 12×. 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 19 mi of the line.
Sandstone, 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.
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 Pikeville reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Levisa Fork, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,740 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 Pikeville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pikeville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Williamson, 19 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
