The Loving 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
Showers likely
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
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Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Loving’s center stands about 1,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,160 ft to 1,340 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Markley Formation (sandstone), from the Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 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 59×. 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: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Loving reaches the Gulf of America by way of Briar Creek, Salt Creek and the Brazos: about 770 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Granbury.
550 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Loving; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
