The Onaga 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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Onaga’s center stands about 1,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,070 ft to 1,290 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Ephraim, about 1,310 ft, 14 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wabaunsee Group (shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 44×. 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: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 1 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 Onaga reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hise Creek, Vermillion Creek, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,680 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Onaga; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
