The Sand Springs 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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Sand Springs’s center stands about 2,420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,280 ft to 2,520 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Scenic Mountain, about 2,810 ft, 9 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 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 113 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Sand Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beals Creek and the Colorado: about 810 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 Sand Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
