The Delaware 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.
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Delaware’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 860 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dillsboro Formation (limestone, shale), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 52×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 Delaware reaches the Gulf of America by way of Castators Creek, Laughery Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,500 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Delaware; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
