Plunketts Creek is a 6.2-mile-long (10.0 km) tributary of Loyalsock Creek in Lycoming and Sullivan counties in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Its watershed drains 23.6 square miles (61 km2) in the Chesapeake Bay basin by way of the West Branch Susquehanna and Susquehanna rivers. The creek is named for Colonel William Plunkett, who led a Pennsylvania expedition in the Pennamite–Yankee War to forcibly remove settlers arriving from Connecticut, who were claiming lands that were also claimed by Pennsylvania. For his services, Plunkett was granted land that included the creek's mouth. The creek flows southwest and then south through the dissected Allegheny Plateau, through rock from the Mississippian sub-period and Devonian period. Much of the Plunketts Creek valley is composed of glacial deposits, chiefly alluvium. A potentially large source of natural gas, the Marcellus Shale, lies 1.5 to 2.0 miles (2.4 to 3.2 km) below the surface. Although the watershed was clear-cut and home to a tannery, sawmills, and a coal mine in the nineteenth century, today it is heavily wooded with abundant potable water. (Full article...)