Artistic License Geology: Difference between revisions
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For example, earthquakes rarely last more than 30 seconds and are usually produced along tectonic boundaries. Sometimes this is different and large quakes can happen in places where you normally don't expect them, such as in ''[[Earthquake In New York]]''. Problem is, such quakes are RARE. As in once in many lifetimes rare. The massive New Madrid earthquakes in 1812 are unlikely to repeat themselves any time for the next 200 years. But this is not the point. The point in such movies is that while the premise of an earthquake somewhere you don't expect is plausible, the actual depiction of the event is usually not.
This can get incredibly [[Egregious]] at times. Cracks do not chase B actors or swallow entire cities whole without a trace. Ground shaking does not just move from left to right or just up and down. Likewise, lasting a very long time [[Screw the Rules I Have Plot|for dramatic purposes]] kills the science. Extremely long duration quakes are rare and when they do happen they tend to occur only on the largest ones. The Sumatra quake in 2004, which is the 3rd largest earthquake ever recorded, lasted
But this is not the only time geology gets failing grades. Volcanoes are another example. [[Outrun the Fireball|Outrunning the Lava Flow]] in [[Real Life]] is as easy as picking up to a brisk walk. Rarely does it move any faster, but it frequently outruns sprinters in TV land. Inversely, you cannot [[Outrun the Fireball|Outrun the Pyroclastic Flow]]. Those travel near the speed of sound and will destroy anything in its path not strong enough to withstand a [[The Deadliest Mushroom|one-megaton nuclear weapon.]] Related to this are writers' tendencies to ignore the well-established conventions for volcanic activity such as the fact that precursory activity is known and alerted for sometimes a month or more in advance of an actual eruption-even the famous "Cornfield Volcano", Paricutín, which sprouted from its namesake cornfield in 1943 and grew 1,000 feet in under a year, occurred in a region where there are ''hundreds'' more cinder cones-so while the unlucky farmer was surprised, scientists were not. But in TV Land, volcanoes can pop out of the ground wherever they damn well please and surprise big budget actors playing scientists with the [[Idiot Ball]]. And we haven't even mentioned the [[Convection, Schmonvection|heat given off by lava flows yet...]]
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* The volcano part of [[The Movie]] of ''[[Congo]]'' also has this. The lava flow cascading through the buried city of Zinj runs at seemingly tsunami speeds on-camera. To say nothing of other geological [[Incredibly Lame Pun|faults]]. (Diamonds in a basalt flow?)
** It should be noted Virunga region of the Congo is just about the only place in the world where lava actually moves this fast. Flows from Mount Nyiragongo have been clocked at about 60 MPH.
* ''[[Waterworld]]'': If you melted all the ice on the planet you could cause a
* ''[[Armageddon]]'''s first scene is a depiction of the meteor/comet collision which is widely believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, approximately 65 million years ago. Apparently so that we'll know what planet we're looking at, the continents are depicted in their modern positions, as opposed to where they actually were (which was more like [[wikipedia:File:LateCretaceousGlobal.jpg|this]]).
* ''Crack In The World'' movie from 1965.
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* In ''[[Outlander (film)|Outlander]]'', the protagonists trek through lava-filled tunnels... in Norway. The Fennoscandian Shield which makes up Norway's land mass is one of the most tectonically stable areas in the world, and has had no volcanic activity for hundreds of millions of years.
* ''[[2012|Two Thousand Twelve]]'' is just silly. We'd explain further, but we'd be here all day.
* In ''[[Gamera]] Vs Zigra'', the main villain causes multiple earthquakes. The strongest earthquake in the film does a lot of damage, but most buildings are still left standing. This earthquake is said to have a magnitude of 18 on the Richter
== [[Literature]] ==
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*** Magnesium exists in rocks as well (the magnesium in the oceans is the result of those rocks weathering). Very magnesium-rich rocks tend to be rare on Earth's surface, as they have a high melting point. The Earth's mantle, however, is largely formed out of megnesium-rich perovskite. Pure magnesium, however, does not exist in nature. It is always found as magnesium compounds (in rocks usually bonded with silica).
* There is a ''[[Hardy Boys]]'' novel wherein the boys experienced a powerful earthquake that lasted about a minute and threw them off their feet. We later find out that the quake measured "between 3 and 4 on the Richter scale." As any Californian could tell you, you might not even ''notice'' a tremor of that magnitude, especially if your attention was focused on something else at the time. And if you did notice it, your first reaction would not be "Yikes, earthquake!" but "That must be a pretty big truck."
* Stephen Baxter's ''Flood'' and ''Ark'' are a series based off the laughable notion that a crack in the ocean floor would result in untold amounts of water "trapped below" gushing up and basically
** Actually, the samples from the [[wikipedia:Kola Superdeep Borehole#Research|Kola Superdeep Borehole]] showed that the deep crust is downright saturated with water and even hydrogen gas, trapped by layers of impermeable rock above it. That there's enough of it to flood the planet with
*** Keep in mind that this is water trapped deep under continental crust, unlike in the novel (where the water is coming up from the mantle). In particular, the research that Baxter cites at the end refers to a mass of water-bearing ''rock'', in which the actual water is a small percentage of the rock (although amusingly enough, the research paper author said he'd been getting letters and e-mails from people asking him if it was the water from Noah's Flood).
* Very common in [[Cthulhu Mythos]] stories. While some elements such as islands rising from the sea floor might be justified under [[Rule of Cool]] and/or [[Science Marches On]], other examples have no such excuse (e.g. Lin Carter saying that a creepy figurine doesn't look like jade, feels different than jade, and weighs more than jade ever could, yet continuing to ''call'' it jade).
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* Throughout the past decade, the numbers of [[Yanks With Tanks|U.S. forces]] stationed on Guam, a fairly small island in the western Pacific owned by the United States, has steadily increased as forward deployed [[Semper Fi|Marines]] and [[Peace Through Superior Firepower|B-2 bombers]] have been redeployed there from other places, like Japan. In a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia expressed his concern that this buildup of forces [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZczIgVXjg could cause the island to capsize].
** He later explained that he was speaking figuratively, expressing concern to the island's overpopulation, not literal capsizing. Just about no-one else in the room understood him however, which wasn't helped by his completely flat voice that seemed to indicate absolute seriousness.
* The popular belief that southern California will drop into the sea during the "Big One", [[California Collapse|which spawned its own trope]]. Many faults do indeed move primarily in the vertical, but the San Andreas mostly moves horizontally. During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, in some areas the ground rose 0.9 meters-compared to a lateral movement of
** This belief seems to be based on the assumption that once California separates entirely from the North American continent, it will simply drop off, ignoring the fact that California isn't a huge shelf attached only on its interior edge, but is, like the rest of the continent, part of the Earth's crust. Or, in other words, it will become "California Island" rather than sink into the sea. There's also the fact that people are apparently expecting it to neatly break along the state boundary.
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