Devil's Tower for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXLII

Devil's Tower

The staff (and fans) of the Antisocial Network have always decried the practice, as employed by many of our DotD nominees, of attempting to reword information one just doesn't understand. A mixture of greed and desperation, however, appears to have caused many an ignorant self-appointed "professional writer" to do just that during the heyday of the content farm. One of the staff was wandering through the content of an online website recently when she came upon a classic example of just that sort of "writing." Here's returning nominee Jason Chavis and his clumsy attempt to explain the "Devil's Tower History" for USAToday.com. The ignorance displayed by Chavis is... well, "towering."

Far be it from us to try to outdo the National Park Service, so we'll just send our readers to their website to get the actual story of Devil's Tower National Monument. For now, we'll put all our effort into making fun of the dumbassery displayed by Chavis in his version of the information, dumbassery we highly suspect can be chalked up to a liberal arts education combined with simple greed. Here's (some of) what we noticed about Jason's scientific illiteracy, specifically when it comes to geology:

1. "Over 65 million years ago, the Rocky Mountains and the Black Hills began to protrude through the Earth's crust."
2. "Magma came with the mountains and deposited further sedimentary rock."
3. "The rock layers surrounding Devil's Tower began to be laid down during the Triassic period 225 to 195 million years ago. This is called the Spearfish Formation and is composed of sandstone, siltstone and shale."
4. "Over the years, the sides of the formation eroded to give the monument its appearance."

Here's what someone who actually knows something about the geology of the area has to say about Jason's... words:

1. Laramide uplifts in the Rockies and Black Hills do not "protrude through the Earth's crust," they are part of the crust.
2. Magma does not "[deposit] sedimentary rock"; it is the source of igneous rocks.
3. The Spearfish Formation (at least Jason got the capitalization right) is only the rock unit currently exposed at the surface. When the rock of the tower was emplaced, about 50 million years ago, much younger (Cretaceous and Paleogene) rocks covered the area. Erosion of those rocks exposed the rocks of the tower.
4. The vertical jointing that gives the tower its distinctive appearance was not caused by erosion but by the cooling of the igneous rocks.

We find his twaddle compelling reason to name Chavis our Dumbass of the Day, in no small part because more than half of the "facts" (and all of the "science") he spewed in his content were misinformation. Sadly, this bit of rubbish has persisted in cyberspace for more than a decade. Ouch.

SI - WYOMING