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 1996. Next is 14° in 1996.
Benton’s center stands about 640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 Benton reaches Lake Michigan by way of Sand Creek, the Paw Paw and the Saint Joseph: about 6 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
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 warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Benton normally reaches 50° and falls to 35°. The record high is 65°, in 2009; the record low 15°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.66 in, fell in 2021.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Benton Harbor, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
