The Mount Carbon 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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Mount Carbon’s center stands about 700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 540 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 860 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bears Head, about 2,090 ft, 13 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mauch Chunk Formation (shale, siltstone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 16×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 384 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 6 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 Mount Carbon reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Schuylkill and the Delaware: about 180 river miles.
120 miles of the trip are on the Schuylkill.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mount Carbon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
