Glaciers and Fjords, the Dummy Explanation

Few habits of highly unsuccessful freelancers irk our staffers more than the scientifically illiterate types who completely botch their copy-reword-paste jobs because they either just don't' understand what they're writing or they're too lazy to get the facts right. We ran across one such miscreant yesterday, someone who claims "a working background in... earth and ocean sciences," yet knew so little that she barfed up multitudinous errors while trying to pass along "Facts About Fjords" for Sciencing.com. Let's see where S. F. Heron¹ went wrong.

Heron started by explaining that a fjord is a glacial feature, but she immediately went down a rabbit hole of bogosity by opening with this paragraph:

"Imagine an extensive ice sheet draped over the hills and river valleys on the edge of a continent. This ice sheet, called a glacier, formed when sea or fresh water filled the indentations of the land and froze into a solid sheet of ice."

First, a quibble: a glacier isn't "draped" over the landscape, any more than a bulldozer is draped over the landscape. But much, much, much more importantly, that is NOT how glaciers form. Glaciers form when snow doesn't melt during multiple successive warm seasons, forming an extensive sheet of ice. More Heronian mishmash of factoids followed:

"As the glacier melted, the mass of ice crushed rock and earth as it receded from the Earth's surface. This gouging generated a deep U-shaped valleys called a fjords."

No, fjords are formed by continental glaciers that scour out existing fiver valleys while active. Tossing in the words "crushed" and "receded" makes it pretty obvious that Heron was merely reciting poorly-remembered factoids from her elementary-school science classes (none of her references says jack about the creation of fjords). The bogosity, however, continues as S. F. rattles off such half-facts and misinformation as,

• "Estuaries denote the connection between the ocean and inland waterways such as rivers and streams." – "Denote"? It's more than that, S. F.: an estuary is a mixing zone between fresh and salt water.
• "These deep waterways tend to be narrow in design..." – We guess she means "shape" there. What would be useful is explaining why fjords are deep and narrow, but nooooooo!
• "The Gulf Stream that tracks across the Atlantic Ocean fuels the fjord estuaries of Norway. " – We just wanted to make fun of the word choice: "fuels"??

We rather doubt that any reputable science reference would say any of that rubbish, which really makes us wonder where on earth Heron came up with some of her "alternative facts." Whatever the case, we'll keep our eye on the Dumbass of the Day for future awards. 

¹ This S. F. Heron is not the S. F. Heron from Australia who is a coauthor on scientific papers about the connection between global warming and coral bleaching... CLEARLY not.

SI - GLACIERS