The Mount Desert 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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Mount Desert’s center stands about 210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 1,090 ft: steep hill country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cadillac Mountain, about 1,520 ft, 5 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Devonian granite, from the Devonian, 359 to 422 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 35×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, phyllite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Ordovician, 445 to 1,000 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gabbro, diorite, ultramafic. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic, mafic-volcanic. Age: Middle Cambrian, 499 to 507 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 0.3 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.
Rain that falls on Mount Desert runs only a short way, about 2 miles, to the Atlantic Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mount Desert; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
