Glacial Till for Dummies

Glacial till

The world is full of people who realize they don't know everything, and aren't too proud, or too stupid, to admit their lack of knowledge. Heck, we don't have any experts on plenty of topics (think tattooing, makeup and British sitcoms) on our staff here at the Antisocial Network. Yet we don't have any problem admitting our deficiency (though lack of detailed knowledge about BBC sitcoms doesn't necessarily strike us as a "deficiency"), and we know that if we actually needed help with those topics there are experts out there ready and willing to fill in the holes in our knowledge. And then there are our favorite freelancing dumbasses, who don't know anything but pretend they do anyway; all in the desperate search for cash. Take eHow.com contributor Rose Guastella, who once filled in the reading public on the topic, "What is Glacial Till (with pictures), which the nice folks at Leaf Group have since moved to niche site Sciencing.com."¹

First, about those pictures you dug up from various websites, Rose: they're awfully pretty but our staff glaciologist noticed that they're all of glaciers -- none are of till. We put an image of till at the top of this page, just for reference. But that's not why we've brought you here today. You see, Ms Guastella, you didn't do your research properly. You really cite only one resource in your article, a geologist by the name of Michael Pidwirny (University of British Columbia Okanagan). We appreciate that you seem to have gone to an expert, but Rose? You should have gone to more than one expert. Here's why: your introduction to glaciers says, "A glacier is a mass of accumulated snow and ice that originates in a mountain range..." and while the definition is technically true, it's only half of the story. If you had gone to, oh, we don't know, any of thousands of websites, you would have learned something: what you describe is an alpine glacier, such as you might see in Glacier National Park. But there have also been enormous sheets of ice that cover huge areas, even whole continents, called -- can you guess? -- continental glaciers. You'd think that someone from SUNY Stony Brook would have at least heard of continental glaciation, right? Guess it's that MA in "liberal studies"...

That's why, even though Rose doesn't say anything that's totally wrong (unusual as that may be for a eHow contributor), we're giving her our not-so-coveted Dumbass of the Day award. Around here, we think that half-truths aren't all that different from lies, and half-information isn't much better than no information at all.

¹ Leaf called in a rewrite specialist to rework Rose's text, but his version is no better than what she wrote. Bummer...

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