The Esperance 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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Esperance’s center stands about 660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 560 ft to 1,410 ft, a difference of 850 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Petersburg Mountain, about 2,360 ft, 11 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Schenectady Formation (graywacke, sandstone, siltstone), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Graywacke, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Devonian, 388 to 394 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 388 to 410 million years old. About 0.3 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 Esperance reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Schoharie Creek, the Mohawk and the Hudson: about 220 river miles.
160 miles of the trip are on the Hudson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Esperance; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
