The Shady Dale 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.
Shady Dale’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 490 ft to 690 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granite Gneiss/ Amphibolite (gneiss, amphibolite), from the Precambrian to Paleozoic.
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 55×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 12 mi of the line.
Amphibolite, biotite-gneiss, mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. 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 Shady Dale reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Hanna Branch, the Little River, the Oconee and the Altamaha: about 310 river miles.
140 miles of the trip are on the Oconee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Shady Dale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.