The Gause 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.
Gause’s center stands about 390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 270 ft to 480 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Taylor Mountain, about 650 ft, 13 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Reklaw Formation (sandstone), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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 55×. 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. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 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.
Claystone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 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 Gause reaches the Gulf of America by way of Threemile Creek and the Brazos: about 310 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gause; river miles along the main stem, rounded.