The Lyndhurst 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.
Lyndhurst’s center stands about 1,430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,330 ft to 1,930 ft, a difference of 600 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Potatopatch Mountain, about 3,850 ft, 7 miles south.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metabasalt. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartzite, conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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. 7 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 Lyndhurst reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Back Creek, the South River, the South Fork Shenandoah, the Shenandoah and the Potomac: about 360 river miles.
180 miles of the trip are on the Potomac.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lyndhurst; river miles along the main stem, rounded.