The Clarks 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. 14, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 26° in 2014.
Clarks’s center stands about 160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 120 ft to 260 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Hill, about 340 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, sand, lignite. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Clarks reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hurricane Creek, Castor Creek, the Little River, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 340 river miles.
Lake on the way: Catahoula Lake.
100 miles of the trip are on the Atchafalaya.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Clarks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clarks has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 59 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Columbia Lock, 10 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
