The Gordon 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.
Gordon’s center stands about 180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 80 ft to 250 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Claiborne/Jackson Group; Residuum (clay), from the Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.5 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 Gordon reaches the Gulf of America by way of Howards Mill Creek, the Chattahoochee and the Apalachicola: about 140 river miles.
110 miles of the trip are on the Apalachicola.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gordon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.