Arizona Rocks for a Dummy Scot

Geologic map of Arizona

We freely admit that a lot of the questions people ask on the internet are, to be polite, dumber than hell. We also realize that, when faced with a stupid question, it can be difficult to fashion an answer that isn't stupid in its own right. Nevertheless, we are categorically opposed to the stupidification of the internet at the hands for freelancers who have no earthly idea what they're talking about. A case in point: Cathel Hutchison and his attempt to explain the "Stones Found in Arizona" at Sciencing.com.

Hutchison, who says in his LinkedIn profile that he has a B. Sc. in Geology from the Open University, certainly failed to make his alma mater proud with this post. We'll go so far as to say that he completely failed to understand the question which, we are fairly sure, was either written by an elementary school student starting a rock collection or by someone wondering whether the odd rock he'd just found was worth a fortune. Cathel, however, decided to get semi-literal (and semi-literate).

Instead of addressing the question by discussing rock types and known deposits of valuable minerals, Cathel chose a random geological map – a USGS geological map of part of southeastern Arizona – and harvested random factoids from the sheet. His answer included such scintillating information as,

• "The Upper San Pedro Valley in Arizona is a particularly excellent location to collect stones, with stones dating from the Holocene, [sic] all the way back to the Jurassic." – Ummm, no, the rocks shown on the map – which are stratigraphic formations and not "stones" – range all the way back to the Precambrian. Hutchison apparently only looked at the left-hand column of the map legend.
• "Basalt stones are found in Arizona and hard to the touch..." – We'd be hard-pressed (rimshot) to name a stone that isn't "hard to the touch"!
• "Granite stones... are composed of four different minerals – quartz, feldspar, mica, and hornblende..." – That will come as a surprise to geologists who've encountered other minerals in granites.
• "...Obsidian [is] a shiny textured [sic] volcanic stone that fractures when it breaks..." – Wait, doesn't "fracture" mean the same thing as "break"? Sure it does! And just what is a "shiny texture"?
• "[Arizona] is home to igneous stones, sedimentary stones, and refashioned metamorphic stones." – WTF is this "refashioned" stuff?

Besides the fact that the upper San Pedro River valley is in no way representative of the whole of Arizona (a locale we doubt Hutchison had ever seen), the "information" our Dumbass of the Day shared is a mélange of misinformation, half-fact, and half outright dumbassery.

Oh, and he apparently doesn't know the difference between "rock" and "stone"...

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