The Lovingston 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.
Lovingston’s center stands about 740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 1,860 ft, a difference of 1,240 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is The Priest, about 4,060 ft, 11 miles west-northwest.
The section below crosses 17 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Phyllite, schist. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Argillite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mylonite, gneiss, cataclasite. Age: Proterozoic to Phanerozoic, less than 2,500 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. 11 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 Lovingston reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Town Creek, Rucker Run, the Tye and the James: about 230 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lovingston; river miles along the main stem, rounded.