The Loop 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.
Chance of showers
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Mostly cloudy
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Mostly sunny; warmer
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Partly cloudy
Loop’s center stands about 3,260 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,200 ft to 3,290 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sand sheet deposits, from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 47×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 0.4 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 Loop reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beals Creek and the Colorado: about 960 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Buchanan Lake, Lake Marble Falls, E V Spence Reservoir and Lake Lyndon B Johnson.
320 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Loop; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
