The Big Spring 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 Spring’s center stands about 2,440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,390 ft to 2,770 ft, a difference of 380 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Scenic Mountain, about 2,810 ft, 2 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Formation (sand), from the Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old.
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 45×. 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: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 113 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, 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. 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 Spring reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beals Creek and the Colorado: about 820 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Buchanan Lake, Lake Marble Falls, E V Spence Reservoir and Lake Lyndon B Johnson.
320 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Spring; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
