The Tipton 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.
Tipton’s center stands about 830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 840 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Scotch Grove Formation (dolostone), from the Silurian, 431 to 440 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 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.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 431 to 440 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone, mudstone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 3 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 Tipton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crooked Creek, the Cedar River, the Iowa and the Mississippi: about 1,490 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Tipton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.