Earthquakes for Dummies (Tectonics Week 4)

Strait of Malacca

eHow.com isn't the only content farm filled with the work of halfwit freelancers, though with helium.com, suite101.com and AssociatedContent.com gone, it's the biggest one left. A few little guys remain out at the edges of the Panda universe, sites like InfoBarrel.com and WritEdge.com¹ that try to keep the bull to a minimum. In the case of InfoBarrel, though, there's still plenty of the old crap on the site; crap like "Biggest Earthquake in History" by a putz claiming to be named Xath Cruz.

Xath's piece is actually about the ten biggest earthquakes in history, a list he (she? it?) copied from somewhere and translated into dumbass-ese. What left our staff geologist scratching his head was rubbish like:

"The earth’s crust, the deepest layer of the Earth, is made of separate pieces that keep moving around slowly. These pieces are what we call tectonic plates. The edge of these plates is what we call faults. These pieces sometimes move and bump each other. Since the edges of these plates aren’t smooth, they get stuck. After a time, these plates will unstick, that’s when an Earthquake happens." Ummmm, yeah: the crust is the "deepest layer of the Earth"? You meant "shallowest," right? And there are only faults at the boundaries of these "pieces"? And the plates "sometimes move and bump into each other"?

Another dumbass who, like Linda Sue Meagher, thinks the tectonic plates are like icebergs floating in an ocean (presumably of that strange substance, "magma"). They're not: there aren't gaps between the tectonic plates! 

Xath's a veritable fountain of misinformation, including bald-faced bullshit like this "history" of the quake that struck Indonesia the day after Christmas, 2004:

"What is more important is the effect it created on the environment, specifically on the Malacca Straight [sic]. The depth was previously 4,000 feet but after the earthquake, it became 100 feet. New navigation maps had to be produced, not to mention changes in the cargo industry." Ummm, yeah... I found it on the internet, it must be true... Dumbass: Dumbass of the Day.

¹ Oops: now Writedge is gone, too...

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