The Imperial 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Imperial’s center stands about 2,390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,370 ft to 2,410 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Chemical. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old. About 0.5 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 Imperial reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Pecos and the Rio Grande: about 860 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake and Amistad Reservoir.
270 miles of the trip are on the Rio Grande.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Imperial; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
