The De Soto 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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De Soto’s center stands about 220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 340 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cockfield (clay, sand), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 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, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Marl, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 De Soto reaches the Gulf of America by way of Black Creek, the Chickasawhay, the Pascagoula and the West Pascagoula: about 200 river miles.
130 miles of the trip are on the Chickasawhay.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of De Soto; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
