The Scott City quadrangle is located at the northern end of the
Mississippi embayment (fig. 1). The quadrangle contains parts of
three physiographic features: the abandoned channel of the ancestral Mississippi River, the Benton Hills, and the flood plain of the
ancestral Ohio River and modern Mississippi River. These features
are largely the manifestation of the Quaternary evolution of the
Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, the chronology and analysis of which
has been discussed by Fisk (1944), Saucier (1968, 1974, 1994),
Guccione and others (1990), Madole and others (1991), Autin and
others (1991), Porter and Guccione (1994), and Blum and others
(1995a,b).