The Canadian Shield for Dummies

Canadian Shield, in red

The central idea behind Demand Media's eHow.com site was basically this: people are looking for information, so let's give it to them. Never mind that DMS¹ generally ended up paying out-of-work journalism grads and English majors to answer those questions, regardless of their knowledge... Some of the questions, since they were scraped from internet search engines, were ambiguous at best and nonsensical at worst; still eHow.com contributors "answered" them – like Brooke Ashley pretended to tell someone "What Are the Bodies of Water In the Canadian Shield?" at azCentral.com.

Brooke rightly assumed that most people could define "body of water," so decided she needed to define the Canadian Shield. According to Ashley,

"The Canadian Shield is a large geographical area that covers eastern and central Canada and parts of the northern United States. Comprised of bare rock, including granite and gneiss, the Canadian Shield dates back to the Precambrian Era (between 4.5 billion and 540 million years ago.)"

Our house grammarian says, "It's 'composed of'' or 'it comprises,' but it ain't 'comprised of.' Didn't they teach you the difference in creative writing school?" The house forester says, "You have a picture of trees and grass near Hudson Bay, so it ain't 'bare rock'!" And finally, the house geologist heaves a mighty sigh and says, "The shield is the core of the North American continent, not to mention that lots of it is more than 2 billion years old." Other than those errors,² Brooke's intro is spot on.

Of course, we find the actual question ambiguous: did the OQ want a list of bodies of water? or did the OQ want to know how those bodies of water formed? Brooke chose the former, reducing the thousands of lakes on the shield to the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, Hudson Bay, and Lake Athabasca. Yup: that's all.

Of course, if she'd bothered to read the entire entry at Wikipedia, Ashley might have learned that the bodies of water on the Canadian Shield tend to be features scooped out by the glaciers that covered the region during the Pleistocene, and that most of the soil is now in places like Illinois and Indiana. She also missed the fact that Hudson Bay rests in an isostatic depression caused by the Pleistocene glaciers.

Brooke clearly had problems with describing the shield, claiming that

• "In the Thousand Islands vicinity of the St. Lawrence River, the Canadian Shield crosses the foothills of this region between Southern Ontario and northern New York. High walls of granite formations are notable in this region, given the glacial carving from millions of years past." – Sorry, Brooke, those "walls" are limestone, not granite. Plus, WTF does that "crosses the foothills" business mean, anyway?
• "Lake Superior meets with the St. Lawrence River in the lower river basin..." – Umm, Brooke? The St. Lawrence River drains Lake Ontario, not Lake Superior!
• "The basins and paths, including small freshwater rivers and creeks connected to the Great Lakes, were formed by the Shield." – We have no earthly idea what that's supposed to mean...
• "Rock formations are found along the banks of the Hudson Bay, which were formed by glacial activity." – Well, no: the Bay itself is in an depression caused by the mass of the glacial ice. But rocks formed by the glaciers? Naaaah...
• "Several freshwater lakes in Canada are within the Canadian Shield..." – Umm, yeah: thousands is definitely "several."

That's the kind of "information" that creative writing majors like Brooke synthesized from poor-quality references and a basic failure to understand that they did read. It's precisely why we hand out a Dumbass of the Day award every twenty-four hours (and probably have a lifetime supply of candidates).

¹ Demand Media Studios, or DMS; as in, "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS'!"
² Brooke got much of her misinformation from a fifth-grade teacher's website, and some from a Sasquatch-chasing site...

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