The Bethel 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Bethel’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 740 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Grant Lake Limestone and Fairview Formation, Undivided (limestone, shale), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 36×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 0.4 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 Bethel reaches the Gulf of America by way of Town Run, the East Fork Little Miami, the Little Miami, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,520 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bethel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
