The Hancocks Bridge 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
80° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 78° in 1973.
Hancocks Bridge’s center stands barely above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 80 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Mannington Hill, about 170 ft, 9 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lower Member of the Kirkwood Formation (clay, sand), from the Early Miocene, 16 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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, sand. Age: Early Miocene, 16 to 23 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 14 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Early Miocene, 16 to 20 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Middle Paleocene, 59 to 62 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, silt. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Early Paleocene, 62 to 66 million years old. About 0.5 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 Hancocks Bridge reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Alloway Creek and the Delaware: about 30 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hancocks Bridge; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hancocks Bridge has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Hancocks Bridge normally reaches 56° and falls to 38°. The record high is 76°, in 1955; the record low 20°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.42 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 from the Wilmington Area threaded record (Wilmington Airport, 14 miles north-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
