The Tunica 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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12° on Nov. 15, 1940, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 18° in 1986.
Tunica’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 180 ft to 220 ft, a difference of 40 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 16 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 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 Tunica reaches the Gulf of America by way of White Oak Bayou, the Coldwater, the Tallahatchie, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 790 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 Tunica; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tunica has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Tunica normally reaches 62° and falls to 42°. The record high is 85°, in 1955; the record low 18°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.24 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Helena, 17 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
