The Ring of Fire for Dummies (Tectonics Week 3)

Ring of fire

Day three of Tectonics Week, and the Antisocial Network's staff geologist is happy as a pig in poop with all the material. He's already begging to turn this into Tectonics Month (or maybe year...), but a week's all he's going to get. There's just too much other material out there.

Speaking of material, today's Dumbass of the Day hails from a new site (at least one that's new to these pages) suite.io; the one-time Suite101, supposedly with the dreck trimmed out (we'll see about that). She's Linda Sue Meagher, aka Lindasue M, writing on the topic "Increased Earthquake Activity in the Pacific Rim."¹ Linda Sue got her geography kinda mixed up in that first paragraph, where she says,

"The rim of the Pacific Ocean is the scene of much volcanic and earthquake activity. This area is called the 'Pacific Rim of Fire' but is also referred to as the 'Ring of Fire' or 'Circum-Pacific Belt.'"

Well, no, the Ring of Fire isn't generally called the "Pacific Rim of Fire"; that was once a pottery company in the Seattle, Washington, area. We assume she used "rim" instead of "ring" to try to grab eyeballs looking for news about the television show. But we digress... In sum, Linda's content is a weird mashup of valid information, inaccuracies, and misinformation. Our geologist simply shook his balding head over sentences like 

"Plates are like giant rafts which often collide and are forced underneath other plates. The largest plate under the Pacific Ocean (the Pacific Plate) seems to be very active and may even be rotating."

The "rafts" metaphor is a common trope, though saying that plates "often collide" suggests that lithospheric plates float around on the asthenosphere like bumper cars, occasionally banging into other plates. They don't: there are no void spaces between plates. None. Zero. The weirdest paragraph of Linda Sue's article, however, may be, "When two sections of the Earth's crust collide, the slab that is forced back into into the deeper regions of the Earth usually becomes melted when the edges reach a depth which is hot enough. This process is called subduction. The melted crust also releases gases which had become trapped in the ground into the atmosphere. Thus subduction of the Earth's crust helps to recycle the atmosphere."

That's kind of true (though "trapped in the ground" is somewhat disingenuous), but the way the melted crust gets those gases back to the surface should definitely be the focus of this paragraph. After all, the Ring of Fire isn't just a long line of gas grills: it's a huge arc of volcanism, where all that melted crust comes back to the surface in the form of lava. And missing the point like this -- along with all the other misinformation and inaccurate phrasing -- is why the antisocial geologist chose Linda Sue as our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ This website is now defunct, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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