The Sussex 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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19° on Nov. 14, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1982. Next is 20° in 2014.
Sussex’s center stands about 110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 60 ft to 160 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Bacons Castle Formation (gravel), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 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: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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. 2 smaller units 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 Sussex reaches Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Anderson Branch, Hunting Quarter Swamp, the Nottoway and the Chowan: about 100 river miles.
85 miles of the trip are on the Chowan.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sussex; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sussex has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Sussex normally reaches 62° and falls to 38°. The record high is 78°, in 2007; the record low 19°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.30 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1982 at Wakefield 1 NW, 15 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
