The Marks 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.
15° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 17° in 1916.
Marks’s center stands about 160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 150 ft to 210 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.8 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 Marks reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Coldwater, the Tallahatchie, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 720 river miles.
450 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Marks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Marks has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in August; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Marks normally reaches 63° and falls to 42°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 18°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.83 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Clarksdale, 17 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.