The Tangent 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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17° on Nov. 16, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1936. Next is 19° in 1978.
Tangent’s center stands about 240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 220 ft to 270 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Forest Peak, about 1,950 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lacustrine and fluvial sedimentary rocks (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 18×. 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: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Paleocene to Middle Eocene, 38 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Gravel, boulders, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Tangent reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Lake Creek, the Calapooia, the Willamette and the Columbia: about 230 river miles.
Lake on the way: Willamette Falls Hydroelectric Power Reservoir.
100 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Tangent; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tangent has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in August; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. A normal year brings about 5 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 69 inches of water.
On November 14 Tangent normally reaches 53° and falls to 31°. The record high is 69°, in 1999; the record low 20°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 3.37 in, fell in 1942.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1936 at Corvallis Water Bureau, 17 miles west, 350 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
