The Hardwick 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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75° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1942. Next is 67° in 2024.
Hardwick’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 500 ft to 1,100 ft, a difference of 600 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Prospect Hill, about 1,410 ft, 13 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hardwick Tonalite (gneiss), from the Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 24×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Schist, phyllite. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 440 to 454 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Late Ordovician, 449 to 453 million years old. About 1 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 Hardwick reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Muddy Brook, the Ware, the Chicopee and the Connecticut: about 120 river miles.
80 miles of the trip are on the Connecticut.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hardwick; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hardwick has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1942 at Belchertown, 9 miles west-southwest, 350 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
