The Swansea 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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75° on Nov. 11, 2024, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1924. Next is 72° in 1931.
Swansea’s center stands about 340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 300 ft to 480 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Huber/Lisbon/Barnwell Formations, undivided (clay, sand), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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 50×. 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: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.6 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 Swansea reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Fourth Creek, Bull Swamp Creek, the North Fork Edisto, the Edisto and the North Edisto: about 180 river miles.
100 miles of the trip are on the Edisto.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Swansea; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Swansea has a oceanic climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 74 inches of water.
On November 14 Swansea normally reaches 55° and falls to 38°. The record high is 72°, in 1931; the record low 16°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.40 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1924 from the Caesars Head Area threaded record (Columbia Metropolitan Airport, 14 miles north, 120 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
