The Hobbs 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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Hobbs’s center stands about 3,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,590 ft to 3,650 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Formation (sand), from the Middle Miocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 16 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Middle Miocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 16 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 0.8 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Hobbs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beals Creek and the Colorado: about 1,000 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Buchanan Lake, Lake Marble Falls, E V Spence Reservoir and Lake Lyndon B Johnson.
320 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hobbs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
