The Rome 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.
Rome’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 480 ft to 1,210 ft, a difference of 730 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Brier Knob, about 1,220 ft, 6 miles west.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 25×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 Rome reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cattail Run, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,560 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rome; river miles along the main stem, rounded.