The Temple 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; cooler
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Temple’s center stands about 730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 770 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Austin Chalk (marlstone, chalk), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 50×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Marlstone, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Black-shale, sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 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.
A raindrop that lands in Temple reaches the Gulf of America by way of Pepper Creek, the Leon, the Little River and the Brazos: about 430 river miles.
320 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Temple; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
