The Lancaster 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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Lancaster’s center stands about 80 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 160 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Windsor Formation (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.4 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 Lancaster reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Browns Creek, the Eastern Branch Corrotoman, the Corrotoman and the Rappahannock: about 25 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lancaster; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
