I wrote a letter to the Straits Time this morning. There was a factual error in today Sunday Time. So sad. A similar picture as above was printed on page 2. While it is factually correct, the Icelandic Volcanic Ash is not caused by the subduction zone but the divergent zone.

So sad, we would not be teaching geography by 2013 as it would only be an optional subject. Who will point this out then?

Dear Sir,

I refer to the this Sunday Time (18.4.2010) page two prime where a picture was shown as to how a volcanic cloud is formed. While it is factually correct, this is not how the Icelandic volcanic cloud is formed.The colossal ash cloud is not formed by the subduction boundaries as your picture might have suggested but by the divergent boundaries.

According to the United State Geological Survey, divergent boundaries occur along spreading centers where plates are moving apart and new crust is created by magma pushing up from the mantle.

Perhaps the best known of the divergent boundaries is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This submerged mountain range, which extends from the Arctic Ocean to beyond the southern tip of Africa, is but one segment of the global mid-ocean ridge system that encircles the Earth. The rate of spreading along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge averages about 2.5 centimeters per year (cm/yr), or 25 km in a million years. This rate may seem slow by human standards, but because this process has been going on for millions of years, it has resulted in plate movement of thousands of kilometers. Seafloor spreading over the past 100 to 200 million years has caused the Atlantic Ocean to grow from a tiny inlet of water between the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas into the vast ocean that exists today. The volcanic country of Iceland, which straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, offers scientists a natural laboratory for studying on land the processes also occurring along the submerged parts of a spreading ridge. Iceland is splitting along the spreading center between the North American and Eurasian Plates, as North America moves westward relative to Eurasia.

Any geography student worth his salt would have been able to identify the unintended mistake right away.

Yours sincerely

Frances Ong Hock Lin

I do not know if the correction would be printed

This is the reply i got from ST on 21.4.2010

Hello, thank you for writing in. You are right.
We hope to publish the correct version in tomorrow's paper.

Regards,
Angelina Choy
ST Art Department


Cheap thrill for the ess he he