The Benville 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Chance of showers
64° on Nov. 17, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 63° in 2016.
Benville’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,180 ft to 1,230 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gabbro, peridotite, pyroxenite, lamprophyre, and metamorphic equivalents, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Tonalite, dioritic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gabbro, peridotite, pyroxenite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Biotite-schist, migmatite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion 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 Benville reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Mud River, the Thief, the Red Lake, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,120 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Benville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Benville has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Benville normally reaches 36° and falls to 20°. The record high is 62°, in 2025; the record low −12°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.61 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Thorhult, 15 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
