The Little Falls 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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Little Falls’s center stands about 440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 330 ft to 1,260 ft, a difference of 930 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Oak Mountain, about 1,990 ft, 13 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Charnockite, mangerite, pyroxene-quartz syenite gneiss (charnockite, gneiss), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. 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, dolostone. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 497 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss, metasedimentary. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, migmatite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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. 7 smaller units 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 Little Falls reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Mohawk and the Hudson: about 240 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 Little Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
