The Riceville 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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Riceville’s center stands about 4,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,870 ft to 5,430 ft, a difference of 1,560 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Thunder Mountain, about 8,110 ft, 13 miles south.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Conglomerate. Age: Early Cretaceous, 125 to 133 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 113 to 125 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 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. 4 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 Riceville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Belt Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 3,310 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sakakawea, Lake Fort Peck and Lake Sharpe.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Riceville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
