The Gulf Shores 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Gulf Shores’s center stands about 6 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from -10 ft to 50 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
The section below crosses 2 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: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 6 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.
Rain that falls on Gulf Shores runs only a short way, about 5 miles, to Perdido Bay and the Gulf of America.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gulf Shores; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
