The Pella 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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Pella’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 740 ft to 880 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
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.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian to Late Mississippian, 324 to 347 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 0.8 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 Pella reaches the Gulf of America by way of Thunder Creek, the South Skunk, the Skunk and the Mississippi: about 1,530 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pella; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
