The Orient 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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Orient’s center stands about 470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 430 ft to 670 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Peekaboo Mountain, about 1,090 ft, 5 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ordovician - Cambrian unnamed sedimentary rocks (mudstone, sandstone), from the Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 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 28×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Slate, sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 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 Orient reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Skagrock Brook, the Mattawamkeag and the Penobscot: about 140 river miles.
85 miles of the trip are on the Penobscot.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Orient; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
