The Charleston 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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Charleston’s center stands about 220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 160 ft to 360 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Persimmon Hill, about 400 ft, 12 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Zilpha formation and Winona formation (clay, sand), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 63×. 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, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 10 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 Charleston reaches the Gulf of America by way of Tillatoba Creek, the Tallahatchie, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 700 river miles.
450 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Charleston; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
