The Eclectic 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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Eclectic’s center stands about 580 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 620 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tuscaloosa Group; Coker Formation (sand, clay), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 36×. 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, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, quartz-monzonite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 7 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartz-monzonite, granite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 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 Eclectic reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Haney Creek, Townsend Creek, Chubbehatchee Creek, the Tallapoosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 400 river miles.
310 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Eclectic; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
