The Nashville 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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Nashville’s center stands about 240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 290 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miccosukee Formation (clay, sand, gravel), from the Tertiary Neogene, 2.6 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay, sand, gravel. Age: Tertiary Neogene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone. Age: Tertiary Neogene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 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 Nashville reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Withlacoochee and the Suwannee: about 230 river miles.
130 miles of the trip are on the Suwannee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Nashville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
