The Cut Off 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.
Cut Off’s center stands barely above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from -10 ft to 30 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Natural Levees (silt, clay), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.6 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 Cut Off reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Bayou Lafourche: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cut Off; river miles along the main stem, rounded.