The Cape Carteret 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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80° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 80° in 2022.
Cape Carteret’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 80 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Surficial Deposits, Undivided (sand, clay, gravel), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Clay. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, gravel. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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.
Rain that falls on Cape Carteret runs straight into the Atlantic Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cape Carteret; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cape Carteret has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 61 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Newport/Morehead City Wfo, 12 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
