The De Kalb 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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De Kalb’s center stands about 410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 430 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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 to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 0.4 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 De Kalb reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mud Creek, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 620 river miles.
460 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of De Kalb; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
