Crust vs. Lithosphere for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCLXXIII

Earth's layering

We had so much fun pointing out the dumbassery of one of the folks at DifferenceBetween.com earlier this week that we decided to come back to the site and take another lick at their contributors. Today's nominee has a Master's in linguistics, but decided to attempt to explain some basic earth science instead of staying in their lane. Meet Koshal, who pecked around the edges of the topic "Difference Between Lithosphere and Crust," meanwhile managing to make it pretty clear that any study of geology was pretty deep in his/her past.

You would  think that a self-described linguistics expert would be able to spit out a simple definition, but that's not how things are done at DifferenceBetween. No, Koshal never actually came right out and said that the crust is part of the lithosphere; instead s/he/it blathered on for more than 700 words, not all of which could be considered accurate. Let's take a look at some of the misinformation:

• Koshal went into detail on the planet's layers, starting by telling us that "Starting from the center of the earth, it is the core that is encountered first (3400km radius)." Apparently K's reference didn't mention the solid inner core and liquid outer core or, for that matter, the nickel-iron composition. Oh, yeah, and it's more like 3500 km in diameter...
• We were told that "the mantle that surrounds this core... has a radius of 2890km ." Well, no, it's about 2900 km thick. Since it's not a sphere, it doesn't have a radius.
• And then there's, "The surface of the earth down to the mantle that literally floats on the mantle is called the crust and is made of basalt and granite." A) it doesn't "float" and B) it consists of hella more than "basalt and granite"!

If that had been all the dumbassery Koshal published, we'd've probably looked beyond this one for other rubbish on the site; but there's more... there's always more, bogosity such as,

• "The oceanic floor is a crust." – It's not a crust, it's crust.
• "The next layer down the crust [sic] is the uppermost part of the mantle, and the two together make up the lithosphere." – No, that is not the "next layer." 
• "There is continuous movement of these tectonic plates on less dense, almost fluid mantle that makes up asthenosphere." – A) the asthenosphere is more dense, not "less dense"; and B), it's not "fluid," it is plastic. There's a  difference, at least to scientists (as there should be to linguists).
• "Because of the movement of rocks in lithosphere natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides happen." – The "movement of rocks in lithosphere"? is this idiot kidding? The entire plate is moving, not "rocks."
• "Crust consists of the things that are necessary for life." – Only if you ignore air and water, Koshal!

As seems to often the case, this liberal arts graduate attempted to piece together information from authoritative or semi-authoritative sources, but ran afoul of scientific illiteracy. More's the pity, because a Dumbass of the Day with a Master's degree managed to botch some extremely basic material, material that might have been handled easily by a high-school junior; much of it because Koshal probably forced to pad out a simple answer to meet some silly minimum word count.

SI - TECTONICS