The Hamilton 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 sunny; warmer
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78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 76° in 2022.
Hamilton’s center stands about 60 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 200 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Holt Hill, about 450 ft, 13 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cape Ann Complex (alkali-granite, quartz-syenite), from the Late Ordovician to Silurian, 428 to 459 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 61×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Alkali-granite, quartz-syenite. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 428 to 459 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Amphibolite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Ordovician, 445 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Tonalite, diorite. Age: Silurian, 425 to 435 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Syenite. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 428 to 459 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Hamilton reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Miles and the Ipswich: about 9 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hamilton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hamilton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 51 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Beverly, 3 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
