The Bombay Beach 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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Bombay Beach’s center stands about 220 ft below sea level. Within three miles the land runs from -230 ft to -60 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bat Caves Buttes, about 80 ft, 7 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Hypabyssal-basalt, hypabyssal-rhyolite, hypabyssal-dacite. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 28 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.5 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 Bombay Beach runs straight into Salton Sea. Salton Sea has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bombay Beach; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
