Mountain-Building for Dummies (Tectonics Week 7)

Pretty mountains

Tectonics week wouldn't be complete without a visit to HubPages.com, perhaps the biggest remaining content farm besides the Demand Media empire. So that's where our staff geologist goes today, to the hub of one Livingsta A, a "data assurance officer" (according to LinkedIn) who claims to have a physics degree. Uhuh... Livingsta treated us all to her version of tectonics in the marvelous content she called "Types and How Mountains are Formed – For kids" (now at Owlcation.com). We repeat: uhuh...

Liv (may we call you Liv?) opens by telling us that

"Mountains are steeper, larger and taller than hills and are more than 600 metres in height."

A dumbass statement, to be sure: while a few daffynitions of "mountain" include a cutoff, none of them use 600 meters. But she's a "scientist" and she found it on the internet; so it must be true and taught to kids. Liv also tells your kids that

"Many mountains are so high that they reach the colder layers of the atmosphere."

Ummm, no mountain on Earth projects out of the lowest layer of the atmosphere (the troposphere is about 36,000 feet thick). She certainly could have stated that more... accurately. But here's where Liv goes completely nutso: "The earth’s crust is made up of large plates called tectonic plates that fit into each other... The tectonic plates collide triggering deformation and thickening of the crust. This in turn leads to crustal uplift and mountain formation... This crustal uplift can be either a hill or a mountain depending upon the height and slope of the formation. But also to balance the weight of the earth surface, much of the compressed rock is forced downward, producing deep mountain roots making mountains for both upward and downward."

We think you just gotta love this kind of fractured science - it contains just enough correct information to impress homeschooling moms, but so much utter bull it'll drive a knowledgeable person nuts. For her mashup of bull, factoids and actual facts, we hereby award livingsta the Dumbass of the Day with clusters. The clusters are because she claims to be a scientist and still does a crappy job of research.

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