The Falcon Mesa 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Falcon Mesa’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 400 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Sandstone, claystone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Claystone, sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million 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 Falcon Mesa reaches the Gulf of America by way of Paz Ramirez Lake and the Rio Grande: about 300 river miles.
Lake on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Falcon Mesa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
