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 1892. Next is 15° in 1940.
Benton’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 230 ft to 400 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Jackson group (clay), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 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 the Gulf of America by way of Walesheba Creek, the Big Black and the Mississippi: about 550 river miles.
420 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
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 humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Benton normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 89°, in 1921; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.90 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Canton 4 N, 17 miles southeast, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
