The Bethel Springs 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
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9° on Nov. 15, 1969, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1923. Next is 13° in 2019.
Bethel Springs’s center stands about 540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 440 ft to 610 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Peter, about 700 ft, 6 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows McNairy Sand, from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Marl. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cypress Creek, the Hatchie, Porters Creek, Cypress Creek and the Mississippi: about 990 river miles.
800 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bethel Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bethel Springs has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 59 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Bethel Springs normally reaches 62° and falls to 39°. The record high is 81°, in 1985; the record low 17°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.73 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1923 at Selmer, 5 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
