The Niland 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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Niland’s center stands about 140 ft below sea level. Within three miles the land runs from -210 ft to 60 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lion Head Mountain, about 1,290 ft, 11 miles east-northeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. 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 21 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 0.9 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 Niland 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 Niland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
