The Rotan 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.
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Rotan’s center stands about 1,960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,930 ft to 2,040 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Double Mountains, about 2,550 ft, 15 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary deposit, undivided (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 million 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 40×. 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, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Rotan reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Clear Fork and the Brazos: about 1,020 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 Rotan; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
