The Fairfield 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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Fairfield’s center stands about 470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 510 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Calvert Bluff Formation (claystone), from the Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old.
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 62×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Fairfield reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Mims Creek, Upper Keechi Creek and the Trinity: about 300 river miles.
Lake on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake.
120 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fairfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
