Continental Drift by Dummy Freelancers

seafloor stripes

A not-all-that-surprising number of the freelancers our staffers nominate for the DotD have been caught attempting to pass along information they either don't understand or on which they're performing a sort of digital cut-and-paste job. Out task, which we apply regularly, is to call out people whose reason for such "information transfer" appears to be rooted in the desire to get paid instead of in the desire to share knowledge. After all, if you don't have the knowledge in the first place, why are you "sharing" it? That appears to be the problem of Aalla, who published exactly one post at UniverseToday.com, "Continental Drift Theory."

It's hard to know from a single piece of writing whether Aalla was a somewhat precocious 8th-grader or a scientifically ignorant liberal arts graduate, but we're guessing closer to the former (because of her execrable spelling). Whatever the case, she laid out the bare bones of Wegener's theory – the jigsaw puzzle part without the fossil record, etc., – before attempting to explain modern plate tectonic theory It's in the last that she got somewhat... confused. We base that on statements such as,

"Some people refer to the country as Australia, and the continent as, Oceania. They do this because there are other countries, such as New Zealand, included as a part of that particular continent."

No Aalla, the continent is Australia and the region, including the other countries, is known as Oceania. New Zealand is not part of the Australian continent; New Guinea has that honor. She also explained sea-floor spreading thus:

"When the Earth cracks, molten magma, from the middle of the Earth, known as the Mantle, works its way to the surface, where it becomes known as, lava. That lava melts away some of the older layers; then, when the water cools that lava, it forms a new layer of Earth."

First, Aalla, the Earth doesn't "crack"... OK, maybe you could call rifting a form of cracking. Moving right along, though, the "middle of the Earth" is the core, not the mantle. Magma doesn't "[melt] away some of the older layers," it's injected into the rift – but only at spreading centers. Any "melting" of "older layers" takes place in subduction zones, if you're interested – the places where oceanic crust is consumed, not created. And last, but not least, there's this:

"That same equipment also helped scientists recognize that heavy amounts of basalt, a volcanic rock that contains high amounts of iron, could throw compasses off course."

We wonder if this is Aalla's attempt to explain the paired "stripes" in the oceanic crust that record reversals in Earth's magnetic field.

If Aalla wrote this as a 13-year-old, more power to her (although she really should have run it past her Earth Science teacher). If she was a college student or a graduate, fie on her. Either way, she's our Dumbass of the Day.

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