The Chelsea 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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Chelsea’s center stands about 720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 900 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Boggy Formation (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 57×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 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 Chelsea reaches the Gulf of America by way of Pryor Creek, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,090 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chelsea; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
