The Marathon 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° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1915. Next is 7° in 1933.
Marathon’s center stands about 920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 870 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Waynesville and Arnheim Formations, Undivided (shale, limestone), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 40×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 1 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 Marathon reaches the Gulf of America by way of the East Fork Little Miami, the Little Miami, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,540 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 Marathon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Marathon has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Marathon normally reaches 52° and falls to 34°. The record high is 77°, in 1931; the record low 9°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.75 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 from the Wilmington Area threaded record (Wilmington Air Park, 23 miles north-northeast, 150 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
