The Sparks 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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Sparks’s center stands about 850 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 950 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gobblers Knob, about 1,000 ft, 8 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Vanoss Group (shale, limestone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, 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.
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 Sparks reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Deep Fork, the North Canadian, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,180 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 Sparks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
