The Quartzsite 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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Quartzsite’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 1,320 ft, a difference of 520 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Mesa, about 3,630 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary surficial deposits, undivided (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old.
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 9×. 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, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Diorite, alkali-granite, granodiorite. Age: Early Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 150 to 180 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, 0.8 to 3 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Arenite, conglomerate. Age: Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 80 to 160 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 0.4 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 Quartzsite reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Colorado: about 250 river miles.
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 Quartzsite; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
