The Walnut 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.
Walnut Springs’s center stands about 910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chalk Mountain, about 1,260 ft, 13 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Walnut Clay (limestone, shale), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million 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 30×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, marlstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone, marl. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.3 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 Walnut Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Steele Creek and the Brazos: about 490 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Walnut Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.