The Miami 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
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
Miami’s center stands about 3,500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,290 ft to 5,250 ft, a difference of 1,960 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pinal Peak, about 7,820 ft, 8 miles south-southeast.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic, 700 to 1,300 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 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.
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 Miami reaches the Gulf of California by way of Bloody Tanks Wash, Pinal Creek, the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 450 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 60% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Miami; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
