The Moodys 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Moodys’s center stands about 940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 750 ft to 1,130 ft, a difference of 380 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sugar Mountain, about 1,230 ft, 14 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Keokuk and Reeds Spring Formations and St. Joe Group (chert, limestone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 33×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Chert, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician to Carboniferous, 324 to 487 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 Moodys reaches the Gulf of America by way of Fourteenmile Creek, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,040 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 Moodys; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
