The Elizabethtown 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.
Elizabethtown’s center stands about 580 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 550 ft to 1,920 ft, a difference of 1,370 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Beck-horn, about 4,820 ft, 13 miles southwest.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss, metaanorthosite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Elizabethtown reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of the Boquet and the Richelieu: about 160 river miles. The St. Lawrence carries it on to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Lake Champlain.
80 miles of the trip are on the Richelieu.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Elizabethtown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.