The Katy 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.
Katy’s center stands about 140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 120 ft to 170 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lissie Formation (silt, sand, clay), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Silt, sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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.
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 Katy reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Buffalo Bayou: about 65 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Katy; river miles along the main stem, rounded.