The Barnegat Light 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.
Barnegat Light’s center stands about 12 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 20 ft, a difference of 20 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Forked River Mountain, about 190 ft, 12 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wildwood Member of the Kirkwood Formation (clay, sand), from the Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 14 to 20 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.
Sand. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 14 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 14 to 20 million 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.