The Mercer 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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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1993. Next is 67° in 2002.
Mercer’s center stands about 300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 620 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is New Vineyard Mountains, about 2,120 ft, 11 miles northwest.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 434 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Metasandstone, pelitic-schist, metasiltstone. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasandstone. Age: Silurian, 434 to 445 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 0.7 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 Mercer reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Bog Stream, the Sandy and the Kennebec: about 110 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mercer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mercer has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 86 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1993 at New Sharon, 4 miles southwest, 180 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
