The Benton 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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12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1926. Next is 13° in 1959.
Benton’s center stands about 410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 350 ft to 520 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Continental deposits and loess, undifferentiated (fine-detrital), from the Tertiary to Holocene, less than 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Holocene, less than 66 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Cretaceous to Tertiary, 2.6 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.8 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 Benton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Town Creek, the Clarks, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,060 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Benton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Benton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 58 inches of water.
On November 14 Benton normally reaches 59° and falls to 38°. The record high is 81°, in 1931; the record low 13°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.78 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1926 at Murray, 17 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
