The Big Sandy 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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Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Big Sandy’s center stands about 1,350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,100 ft to 2,190 ft, a difference of 1,090 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mullins Mountain, about 2,550 ft, 14 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows New River Formation (sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.5 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 Big Sandy reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Tug Fork, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,780 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Sandy; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
