The Betsy Layne 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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Betsy Layne’s center stands about 1,130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 650 ft to 1,420 ft, a difference of 770 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Abner Mountain, about 2,200 ft, 14 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Breathitt Formation, lower part (shale, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 15×. 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, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Betsy Layne reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Levisa Fork, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,730 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 Betsy Layne; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
