The Rochester 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.
Rochester’s center stands about 1,600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,570 ft to 1,630 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Davidson Peak, about 1,780 ft, 13 miles west-southwest.
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 6 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.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.1 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.