The Blue Springs 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Blue Springs’s center stands about 1,250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,200 ft to 1,350 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Chase Group (limestone, shale), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 62×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 24 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 Blue Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bills Creek, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,790 river miles.
Lake on the way: Tuttle Creek 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 Blue Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
