Arkansas, AR

Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Arkansas shares a border with six states, with its eastern border largely defined by the Mississippi River.

Its diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozarks and the Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River.

The capital and most populous city is Little Rock. The name Arkansas is a French pronunciation of a Quapaw word meaning "land of downriver people". The pronunciation "arkansaw" was made official by an act of the state legislature in 1881.

Geography

The Mississippi River forms most of Arkansas' eastern border, except in Clay and Greene counties where the St. Francis River forms the western boundary of the Missouri Bootheel, and in dozens of places where the current channel of the Mississippi has meandered from where it had last been legally specified.

Arkansas shares its southern border with Louisiana, its northern border with Missouri, its eastern border with Tennessee and Mississippi, and its western border with Texas and Oklahoma. Arkansas is a land of mountains and valleys, thick forests and fertile plains.

Northwest Arkansas is part of the Ozark Plateau including the Boston Mountains, to the south are the Ouachita Mountains and these regions are divided by the Arkansas River; the southern and eastern parts of Arkansas are called the Lowlands. All of these mountains ranges are part of the U.S. Interior Highlands region, the only major mountainous region between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains.

The so-called Lowlands are better known by names of their two regions, the Delta and the Grand Prairie. The Arkansas Delta is a flat landscape of rich alluvial soils formed by repeated flooding of the adjacent Mississippi.

Further away from the river, in the southeast portion of the state, the Grand Prairie consists of a more undulating landscape. Both are fertile agricultural areas.

The Delta region is bisected by an unusual geological formation known as Crowley's Ridge. A narrow band of rolling hills, Crowley's Ridge rises from 250 to 500 feet above the surrounding alluvial plain and underlies many of the major towns of eastern Arkansas.

Arkansas is home to many caves, such as Blanchard Springs Caverns. It is also the first U.S. state in which diamonds were found (near Murfreesboro).

Climate

Arkansas generally has a humid subtropical climate, which borders on humid continental in some northern highland areas.

While not bordering the Gulf of Mexico, Arkansas is still close enough to this warm, large body of water for it to be the main weather influence in the state. Generally, Arkansas has very hot, humid summers and mild, slightly drier winters.

In Little Rock, the daily high temperatures average around 90 °F (32 °C) in the summer and close to 50 °F (10 °C) in winter. Annual precipitation throughout the state averages between 40 and 50 inches (1,000 to 1,250 mm); getting gradually wetter as you go from west to east. Snowfall is not uncommon, but certainly not excessive in most years as the average snowfall is around 5 inches (13 cm).

Despite its subtropical climate, Arkansas is known for occasional extreme weather. Between both the Great Plains and the Gulf States, Arkansas receives around 60 days of thunderstorms.

As a part of Tornado Alley, tornadoes are not an uncommon occurrence in Arkansas, and a few of the most destructive tornadoes in U.S. history have struck the state.

While being sufficiently away from the coast to be safe from a direct hit from a hurricane, Arkansas can often get the remnants of a tropical system which dumps tremendous amounts of rain in a short time and often spawns smaller tornadoes.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Arkansas".