The Middle River 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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82° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 80° in 1973.
Middle River’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 160 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Potomac Group, including Raritan and Patapsco Formations, Arundel Clay, and Patuxent Formation (sand), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 33×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Biotite-schist. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartz-monzonite. Age: Cambrian to Silurian, 444 to 488 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gabbro. Age: Proterozoic to Paleozoic, 252 to 2,500 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Gneiss, quartz-diorite, granodiorite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Middle Cambrian, 500 to 600 million years old. About 0.9 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 Middle River reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Middle River: about 3 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Middle River; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Middle River has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Middle River normally reaches 58° and falls to 43°. The record high is 78°, in 1989; the record low 21°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.46 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 from the Baltimore Downtown Area threaded record (Maryland Science Center, 10 miles west-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
