The Sinking Spring 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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7° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 9° in 1894.
Sinking Spring’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 710 ft to 1,230 ft, a difference of 520 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Brown Hill, about 1,350 ft, 5 miles north-northwest.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 30×. 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, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Sinking Spring reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Baker Fork, Ohio Brush Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,600 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sinking Spring; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sinking Spring has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Sinking Spring normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 75°, in 1909; the record low 7°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.76 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Hillsboro, 16 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
