The Marcellus Shale for Dummies

Fracking the Marcellus Shale

The staff geologist is, sadly, quite used to the lay person's misuse of the term "geologic formation" to mean a geographic feature such as a mountain or valley. He realizes he's just being pedantic, but he's a grumpy old guy so that's his normal status. All that, however, is probably why a post at WiseGEEK.com titled "What Is the Marcellus Shale?" has his metaphorical panties tightly bunched. It's probably a good thing that freelancer R. Stamm is hiding behind that first initial, because our guy owns a couple of rock hammers...

Stamm gets off to a bad start in his/her/its very first sentence:

"The Marcellus shale is a large, underground land formation that extends across much of the eastern portion of the United States. "

Our rock guy can already be heard grinding his teeth, in part because "Marcellus Shale" is a proper name and the 'S' should be capitalized. He's willing to let that slide, however, in the face of the moronic term "underground land formation,"¹ which R. used not once but twice. It looks like Stamm must work for the North Carolina legislature, because that body is responsible for about 100 of the 115 or so occurrences of the phrase on the web. Not content with demonstrating his ignorance in the first sentence, Stamm digs himself in even deeper with the next:

"Trapped within the rock are valuable energy resources, such as gas or coal, which in previous years, have been difficult to access."

Ummm, Dude: the Marcellus was deposited hundreds of millions of years before the first land plants; ergo it cannot contain coal! That's not to mention that your writing sucks... Stamm continues with the misinformation, "explaining" that,

"There may be as much as 516 trillion cubic feet (14.6 trillion cubic meters) of natural gas trapped within the vertical joints of the rock formation."

No, R., the natural gas is trapped in pores in the shale. You seem to have conflated the Marcellus play with coal-bed methane. And then there's,

"Energy companies are also inventing new processes, such as fracturing, to access the gas trapped within the rock. The process of fracturing forces water and chemicals into the rock, placing it under pressure and causing it to split apart. Companies can then reach the gas reserves using more traditional methods of vertical and horizontal drilling."

Nope! First, [hydraulic] fracturing is not a "new process." More importantly, you idiot, fracking takes place after drilling, not before! Considering all the misinformation published by Stamm, we think the site should have placed this one in a niche called DumbGEEK.com, or perhaps FakeGEEK.com. As it is, the best we can do is hand R. a Dumbass of the Day award and leave it at that. ¹ We don't know about you, but "underground land formation" sounds like something out of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth!

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