The Archer City 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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Archer City’s center stands about 1,060 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 970 ft to 1,080 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Archer City Formation (black-shale), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 61×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Black-shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Archer City reaches the Gulf of America by way of Onion Creek, the Little Wichita, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,050 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Arrowhead.
830 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Archer City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
