The Essex 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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11° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 17° in 2019.
Essex’s center stands about 300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 330 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rock Knob, about 580 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene series (clay, silt, sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 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: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, gravel. Age: Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Essex reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little River, the Right Hand Chute Little, Iron Mines Creek, the Saint Francis and the Mississippi: about 950 river miles.
690 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Essex; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Essex has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Essex normally reaches 59° and falls to 39°. The record high is 79°, in 1978; the record low 18°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.34 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Sikeston Power Station, 14 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
