The Ben Arnold 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely; cooler
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Sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
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Partly cloudy
Ben Arnold’s center stands about 400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 460 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Navarro Group and Marlbrook Marl, undivided (clay, siltstone-mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, carbonate. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 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 Ben Arnold reaches the Gulf of America by way of Walkers Creek, the Little River and the Brazos: about 350 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ben Arnold; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
