Supercontinents for the Dummy Paleogeographer

Gondwanaland and Laurasia

If we here at the Antisocial Network had to rank the dumbasses we encounter in our research by type, content spinners and people writing advertisements disguised as information rank pretty low on the pole. Another set of pea-brains that tend to incur our collective wrath are those who pretend to write informative content by simply rewording a wikipedia article. Not that wikipedia isn't a better source of information than most content farms (and a heckuva lot of blogs), but faking knowledge always pisses us off. That's why the staff geologist fingered Donovan Sak, who exposed his ignorance to the world with "What Were Earth's Continents Like and What Will They Become?" which he published at InfoBarrel.com (that was before he changed his handle to "Silence Dogood").

Donovan exposes his tenuous grasp of earth science in the very first paragraph, when he opines that 

"Earth is one of the most geologically interesting celestial bodies because of its ever-changing surface and mysterious past."

How Sak has determined that only Earth, among all the "celestial bodies," is the only one with a changing surface totally escapes us. Clearly, he's making a reference to plate tectonics; but planetary scientists are pretty sure that Mars had plate tectonics some time in the past, and that Jupiter's moon Europa is tectonically active today. But they aren't "interesting," we guess... Sak's further observations include,

"Throughout Earth's history many unique supercontinents spring up, and all of them never witnessed by a human eye. While continental drift occurs quickly in a geological sense, it does not compared to human lifespans."

Duh... not just the "never witnessed" crap, but also the implication that supercontinents "spring up" as if they were seedlings on a warm summer day. Perhaps it has something to do with his inability to comprehend just how long a couple of a billion years would last! Donovan then goes on to list the supercontinents historical geologists have identified and/or postulated over the years. In order, according to Sak, they are Vaalbaara, Ur, Kenorland, Columbia, Rodinia, Ponnotia, Pangaea.

Duh. If Donovan insists on rewording wikipedia articles, you'd think that he'd do a better job; e.g. He'd include Gondwanaland and Laurasia in his list  He'd spell "Pannotia" correctly He'd slot Nena in there somewhere between Kenorland and Columbia Our geology guy did find Donovan's illustrations amusing, including "...a picture of what Vaalbaara would be when it was just starting..." It's an image of the dome-shaped stromatolites you can find at Australia's Shark Bay. Cute...

Of course, Sak's post also alludes to future supercontinents, so he scraped some images and  videos purporting to show what the planet's surface will look like 100-250 million years in the future. He does not, however, provide citations...

Besides his sloppy cut-copy-paste job, Donovan commits a wealth of sins. For one thing, he says not one word about why (and how) supercontinents form and reform. For another, he says jack about how one could ever predict what's going to happen to the continents in the next few hundred million years. Sorry, Saks, if you want to be taken seriously, people need to know where all this information comes from and, more to the point, why this happens. You didn't tell us either, and that's why you're our Dumbass of the Day. Duh.

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