The Big Sandy 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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Big Sandy’s center stands about 390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 350 ft to 590 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Nero Hill, about 690 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Big Sandy reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,100 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Sandy; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
