The Shorter 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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Shorter’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 160 ft to 340 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Baxley Hill, about 480 ft, 12 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvial, coastal and low terrace deposits (sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 57×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Chalk, marl. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 Shorter reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Cubahatchee Creek, the Tallapoosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 390 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 Shorter; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
