The Bluefield 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
6° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 8° in 1986.
Bluefield’s center stands about 2,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,340 ft to 3,920 ft, a difference of 1,580 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hutchinson Rock, about 4,520 ft, 13 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Greenbrier Limestone, from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 17 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 11×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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. 11 smaller units 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 Bluefield reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Bluestone, the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,910 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 Bluefield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bluefield has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 35 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Bluefield normally reaches 53° and falls to 35°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.97 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 from the Bluefield Area threaded record (Bluefield Mercer County Airport, 5 miles northeast, 460 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
