The River Bottom 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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16° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 17° in 2014.
River Bottom’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 480 ft to 690 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sellers Mountain, about 1,100 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace Deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
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 42×. 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, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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. 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 River Bottom reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 990 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of River Bottom; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
River Bottom has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 River Bottom normally reaches 62° and falls to 39°. The record high is 81°, in 2025; the record low 21°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.78 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Muskogee Davis Field, 7 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
