The Stearns 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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79° on Nov. 12, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1952. Next is 75° in 1971.
Stearns’s center stands about 1,330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,020 ft to 1,440 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Privet Mountain, about 2,410 ft, 15 miles south-southeast.
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 10 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 11 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 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 Stearns reaches the Gulf of America by way of East Apple Tree Branch, the Bridge Fork, 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 Stearns; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Stearns 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 Stearns 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, 14 miles south-southwest, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
