The Clay 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
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Mostly sunny
Clay’s center stands about 760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 710 ft to 1,460 ft, a difference of 750 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bird Knob, about 1,850 ft, 13 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kanawha Formation (sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 13×. 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, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.8 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 Clay reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Elk River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,790 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 Clay; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
