I wish the editors of a Rhode Island newspaper I recently was reading had learned about olivine before declaring that quartz is the world's most common mineral.

Ouch! Quartz is definitely not the most common mineral. Not for the whole Earth. Not for the Earth's crust. Not even for the quartz-rich continental crust. For the whole Earth, that distinction belongs to olivine and its high-pressure variants. When concentrated, it resembles crushed ice covered with apple-green syrup.

The tidbit of misinformation about quartz was part of the "Do You Know?" feature in the newspaper, which was trying to do the right thing.

The olivine group of minerals makes up more than half of the mantle, which contains two-thirds of the Earth by weight and contains 97 percent of its minerals. The Earth's crust contains less than half a percent of the planet by weight and comes in two versions: oceanic and continental. In both places, the distinction "most common" belongs to the feldspar group. Quartz may be the most well-known mineral after diamond. But that doesn't make it the most common.

By devoting space to cultural literacy rather than something salacious or sporty the newspaper's editors are trying to reinforce what teachers tried to accomplish in school: to impart the common knowledge that helps glue our society together. I wasn't bothered by the wrong fact. What bothered me was why it was wrong. This error says less about loose editing or sloppy researching than it does about an American educational culture that has downplayed earth science education to the basement of environmental education.

In fact, I believe the costly delay in our national policy on "global warming" is mostly about ignorance of how the Earth works. One cannot understand global climate change without knowing something about limestone, soil development, ice ages, evolution, volcanic emissions and fossil fuel. Climatology is a geoscience, as are oceanography and meteorology.