The Pine Knot 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
79° on Nov. 12, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1952. Next is 75° in 1971.
Pine Knot’s center stands about 1,410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,120 ft to 1,450 ft, a difference of 330 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Buffalo Mountain, about 2,780 ft, 14 miles south-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 14×. 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 15 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone. 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 0.5 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 Pine Knot reaches the Gulf of America by way of Laurel Creek, Marsh Creek, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,610 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 Pine Knot; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pine Knot has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 58 inches of water.
On November 14 Pine Knot normally reaches 58° and falls to 32°. The record high is 75°, in 1971; the record low 11°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.76 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1952 at Oneida, 11 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
