Glaciation for the Dummy Geology Student

Extent of continental glaciation, eastern US

While most of our DotD winners barfed up their freelance dumbassery at a single site¹, a few spread their largesse over a larger area. Several can be found at both HubPages.com and the former eHow.com niches, but today's nominee is the first we've caught operating out of both eHow and WiseGreed... err, WiseGEEK. Here's our exposé of the scientifically incompetent Michael Smathers with his WiseGEEK-style answer to the question, "What Is Glaciation?" at AllThingsNature.com (a WiseGEEK niche site).

Smathers (he used the middle initial "O" when writing for eHow) did what the history student did in his Sciencing.com articles: he threw a lot of jumbled-up factoids onto the page and bet that his editor (in this case, Jessica Seminara) was equally clueless about the topic. It turns out that she was. Smathers opened his opus by telling us that,

"In the scientific community, the planet Earth is commonly understood to undergo periodic climate changes, with fluctuating temperature levels. Records of these changes can be found in the geological strata of Earth and in the chemical signatures of fossilized remains. Glaciation is the result of lowered temperatures around the planet; specifically, the movement and activity of glaciers."

We're kind of confused: the bit about "chemical signatures of fossilized remains" is pretty darned ambiguous, but that last sentence is written in such a way that it seems that Mike blames glaciation for climate change. Seems to us it's the other way 'round! But wait. Smathers has more: let's dissect some of his factoids:

• "Glaciers typically form at high altitudes above the snow line [sic], where temperatures are low enough that snow is permanent. " – We think maybe he means "tree line"?
• "Also, glaciers expand when snow falls onto them and freezes into ice." – There's no "also" about it: that's the only way glaciers expand!
• "Periods of glaciation occur with the Milankovitch cycles, or the variations in Earth's orbit around the sun over a period of 100,000 years." – Michael, Michael, Michael: it might have helped if you understood what you were writing in your daffynition of Milankovitch cycles. The expanded "explanation" is proof positive that you have no earthly idea what you're talking about...

It's obvious to our staff, at least those who know what glaciers are, that Smathers merely copied and pasted information he did not comprehend. The reason it's obvious is the absence of two words from his alleged definition: "alpine" and "continental." Michael attempted to explain why glaciers occur (there are other possible reasons, by the way), but almost everything he wrote applied to alpine glaciation.

In the world of glaciation, alpine glaciers are the movie stars: they're pretty and they show up in all the best places, like Glacier National Park and the Swiss Alps. Continental glaciers, on the other hand, are the blue-collar types who do the vast majority of the heavy lifting. Huge swaths of the continents have been reshaped by the inexorable force of continental glacier ice many times over geologic history, but did Smathers even mention them? No! and when freelance writers demonstrate total ignorance of their topic like Michael has, we have no choice but to name them the Dumbass of the Day.

¹ Well, at least over a single surviving site: who knows what rubbish some of these drones published at Squidoo, AssociatedContent, Helium, Lunch, and the like?

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