The Bear Grass 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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6.00 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1930. The next wettest, 5.55 inches, fell in 2020.
Bear Grass’s center stands about 60 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 30 ft to 110 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Yorktown Formation and Duplin Formation, Undivided (clay), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
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.
Clay. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 24 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 Bear Grass reaches Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Bear Grass Swamp, Tranters Creek and the Pamlico: about 70 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bear Grass; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bear Grass has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 53 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bear Grass normally reaches 64° and falls to 42°. The record high is 81°, in 1959; the record low 23°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.82 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1930 at Williamston 1 E, 8 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
