The Piedmont 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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Piedmont’s center stands about 710 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 650 ft to 1,160 ft, a difference of 510 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Oak Mountain, about 2,050 ft, 15 miles south-southwest.
The section below crosses 11 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Phyllite, metaclastic. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mudstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 5 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 Piedmont reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Terrapin Creek, the Coosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 600 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lay Lake.
310 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Piedmont; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
