The Wilson 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Wilson’s center stands about 290 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 360 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows High Terraces (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million 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 Wilson reaches Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of America by way of Redwood Creek, the Comite and the Amite: about 120 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Maurepas.
55 miles of the trip are on the Amite.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wilson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
