The Royse City 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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Royse City’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 510 ft to 600 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marlbrook Marl (clay), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 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.
Clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Royse City reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sabine Creek, the South Fork Sabine and the Sabine: about 510 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Toledo Bend Reservoir, Sabine Lake and Lake Tawakoni.
240 miles of the trip are on the Sabine.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Royse City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
