The Marathon 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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77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 76° in 2022.
Marathon’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 750 ft to 930 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Michigan Formation (shale), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
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 51×. 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: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.4 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 Marathon reaches Lake Huron by way of the Hemmingway and Whipple Drain, the Flint, the Shiawassee and the Saginaw: about 110 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
75 miles of the trip are on the Flint.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Marathon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Marathon 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 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 Marathon normally reaches 48° and falls to 31°. The record high is 67°, in 1989; the record low 6°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.41 in, fell in 1959.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Lapeer Wwtp, 10 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
