The Sweetwater 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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Sweetwater’s center stands about 2,170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,060 ft to 2,330 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 29×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 0.5 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 Sweetwater reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sweetwater Creek, the North Fork Red, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,300 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Altus.
960 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sweetwater; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
