The Palo 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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Palo’s center stands about 800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 760 ft to 890 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Saginaw Formation (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 55×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Palo reaches Lake Michigan by way of Prairie Creek and the Grand River: about 110 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
90 miles of the trip are on the Grand River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Palo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
