The Benkelman 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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Benkelman’s center stands about 3,040 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,950 ft to 3,190 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 31×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Benkelman reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,110 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Harlan County Lake and Swanson Lake.
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 Benkelman; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
