The Great Plains for Dummies

Local relief: This ain't "exceptionally flat"!

Every once in a while we run across a post in one of the former eHow.com niches that is so riddled with inaccuracy that it is just plain jaw-dropping Today's is one such post, a pastiche of disconnected factoids cobbled together by someone who claims to have a MA in "science writing," a degree that her alma mater may wish to consider clawing back. Here is just some of the bogosity pounded out by Meg Michelle in the Sciencing.com post entitled "Facts About the Great Plains."

The post is a circa 2015 rewrite of a factual, if rather dry, version written by Regina Sass in 2009. Oddly, it appears to have been buffed up a bit since being ported to Sciencing from its original home at eHow, although the byline is unchanged. All snippets quoted here are from the version dated 25 April 2018. And awaaay we go!

• "The Great Plains are exceptionally flat because they used to be the bed of what was once the interior sea." –  First, the Great Plains are not "exceptionally flat," and second, their relatively low relief is not because they were once a sea bed but because they lie in the stable interior of the continent. 
• "The Great Plains were completely submerged, 570 million years ago." – Uhhh, yeah, and also about 300 million years ago, 240 million years ago, 110 million years ago, and more recently, 65 million years ago. So what's your point, Meg?
• "As the tectonic plates began to shift and the North American continent thrust upward..." –  Wait, what? the entire continent "thrust upward"? WTF?
• "...in central Texas there is a sudden upthrust of land in the middle of otherwise level plains." – I'm sure that comes as a surprise to the people who live in central Texas. Is she maybe thinking of the Edwards Plateau?
• "Rivers, glaciers, wind and continued continental uplift shaped the Plains over the course of hundreds of millions of years, although most of the modern formations were created within the last two million years." – It'd be interesting to understand what Michelle means by "modern" and also by "formation."

Such is Meg's level of understanding of the geology and geography of the Great Plains. We didn't bother dissecting her segments on the flora and fauna of the plains, except to note that nowhere does she actually explain the climatological factors by which the plains are defined. We note with some satisfaction, however, that at least she (or someone) edited out the erroneous statement that the plains are "bounded by... the Missouri River to the east," a tough sell since much of the Missouri runs east-west. Perhaps she confused it with the Mississippi?

The cockamamie claim that the plains are "exceptionally flat" because they were a seabed "570 million years ago" was, all by itself, enough to earn Michelle her Dumbass of the Day award. Her complete ignorance of plate tectonics contributed mightily as well, not to mention her failure to mention that the land slopes from almost 5,000 feet above sea level at the Rockies to an elevation of less than 1,000 feet at the Mississippi. The rest of her bushwa is just icing on the proverbial cake.

SI - GEOLOGY