The Myrtle 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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Myrtle’s center stands about 430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 360 ft to 550 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Briar Mountain, about 670 ft, 14 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Porters Creek formation (clay), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 57×. 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. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 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 Myrtle reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lockes Creek, the Little Tallahatchie, the Tallahatchie, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 810 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 Myrtle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
