Quartzite for Dummies

Quartzite photomicrograph

In the bad old days of eHow.com, contributors (as the site's freelancers were called) were forbidden to use Wikipedia as a reference. That doesn't mean the typical J-school grad trying to pretend he was Bob Vila or she was Sheldon Cooper didn't go straight to the site when "researching" a topic, it just means they didn't admit it... which sometimes was pretty obvious anyway. Take, for example, today's nominee, wannabe large animal veterinarian Chrissie Mayes, and her Sciencing.com post "Interesting Facts About Quartzite."

Mayes cited only one reference, but the great majority of what appears in her post either isn't in that reference or is contradicted by it. So where'd all that verbiage come from? We don't know: perhaps from her long-ago G-100 course, maybe from Wikipedia. The problem? It's not all... right. We're talking about Mayes' ignorance of the science of quartzite and her laissez-faire attitude toward the language of science. Take this passage from her introduction, for instance:

"Temperature, pressure and chemically changed environments are the usual catalysts of change in metamorphic rock."

Chrissie, Chrissie, Chrissie: that's not what catalyst¹ means! Increased temperature and pressure and the presence of chemically-active fluids are the causes of metamorphism. Mayes, of course, had more factoids about quartzite, many of them a bit on the bogus side, like

• ."...quartz grains are highly compacted resulting in a dense rock" — Quartz grains aren't compacted, the grains recrystallize and close off pore spaces.
• "Quartzite is usually snowy white..." — No, it's usually tan or gray; or dirty white at best.
• "The structure is smooth and hard-wearing with a granular appearance and tends to be seen in hill or mountain ranges, or on rocky coastlines. " — A) Which is it: smooth or granular? B) Every friggin' rock type appears in "hill or mountain ranges," and presence on rocky coastlines is equally non-specific.
• "Quartzite is used for making bricks and other strong building materials." — Bushwa: quartzite is sometimes used for building stone, but never for bricks. 

Our science types get just a little bent out of shape when people who know little or nothing about a topic pretend to write authoritative content. That means they're perfectly fine with giving someone like Mayes today's Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction but is not itself involved in the reaction. You can't use a buzzphrase like "catalyst for change" when you're talking about chemistry!

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