Magma for Dummy Liberal Arts Majors (HSW Week 5)

Magma generation in subduction zones

Welcome to HowStuffWorks week, where we call out seven freelancers who seem to have sold their intellectual souls for a handful of royalties... or perhaps a stipend: we aren't sure how HSW pays. Whatever the case, we sent our staffers to the site to look for bogosity and dumbassery, and we found more than enough to fill out a week. Here's today's example, Tracy V. Wilson and her cockamamie attempt to answer the equally cockamamie question, "Will we ever run out of magma?"

Her BA in literature may serve Wilson well for her history podcast, but science is a little different. In her effort to expand the actual answer from, "No, because magma is continually being generated by recycling old crust," to more than 400 words; Tracy introduced a level of bogosity at odds with the website's claim of "unbiased, reliable... answers." No idea whether Wilson's answer could be considered "unbiased," but it sure ain't "reliable."

It isn't reliable because of the misinformation and misinterpretation that Wilson pounded out in her post, which includes such statements as,

• "Molten material beneath the crust of the earth is called magma." – We think she means "in the crust, below the surface..."
• "Most volcanoes are on plate boundaries... A few volcanoes, like ones found on Hawaii, are instead located over magma hotspots." – Depends on your definition of "few." There are hotspots on all the major tectonic plates, including places like Yellowstone and Antarctica's Mt. Erebus.
• "A common misconception is that magma comes from the Earth's molten core." – Only among the scientifically illiterate, e.g., English lit graduates trying to write about science.
• "The mantle is solid, but it shifts and becomes fluid due to changes in temperature and pressure." – Ummm, no, the mantle's an extremely viscous plastic because of high temperature and pressure.
• "Magma rises up through volcanoes because of the pressure of the colliding plates. " – No, magma rises because because of buoyancy, not because it's squeezed out like toothpaste!

"All of this matter circulates on a very large scale, like an enormous pot of thick stew boiling on a stove." – Here, Wilson is apparently attempting to cite convection currents as a cause of plate tectonics, Boy, did she do a lousy job of that... "Eastern Africa is also home to three plate boundaries, all moving in different directions. Because of this, the Eastern part of Africa may someday be an ocean" – Actually, the boundaries are staying in the same place; the plates are moving. Oh, and East Africa will someday be an island: the space between it and West Africa will be an ocean. Rubbish like this is precisely why we point out the erroneous, semi-scientific content-farm posts written by English and journalism students. It's also why Wilson is picking up a well-deserved Dumbass of the Day award.

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