That would be literally unprecedented in what we know of geologic events. It would require a quarter of the circumference of the Pacific plate to rupture all at once, with the rest of the plate behaving nearly completely rigidly: simultaneously weirdly weak at the edge and stupid strong everywhere else. Considering that the plates aren't that different between the edges and centers (including intraplate faults and weak zones), this is profoundly unlikely.

I'm not saying it could never, ever happen- but it's far more likely that a Hollywood movie featuring the above disaster as a plot and a cast of D-list actors will sweep the Oscars. Don't lose sleep over this.

A family friend went through the process on the other end. She had all the documentation to show it was her work, start to finish. More, truth be told, than I would ever have been able to produce if it had been me in the hot seat. Google Docs had recorded the evolution of her paper. Her citations were complete. She just used the wrong combination of less-common words, and the comp program dug up a source that matched it just enough to trigger.

I know that students get away with plagiarism all the time- even blatent straight up copy/pasting stuff. I myself was told to let it go unless it was verbatim the wiki article. But it shouldn't mean that we have a lighter trigger where we're allowed to enforce shit. Get enough undergrads attempting to sound sophisticated together and they'll eventually reproduce the language of any seminal work.

Allegations of data fraud can fuck someone's entire career, even if shown to be false. As a scientist, I'm completely on board with punitive measures for folks who knowingly and deliberately fuck with data....but I want a human- actually, several humans- looking into it before anything goes public.

The number of horror stories I've read from and about students accused of plagiarism because a comparison program thought their work was too similar to something else is...too high for me to ever place trust in a program. It's too severe of a consequence, and too high a rate of false positives.

That being said, vegetation is not necessary for the formation of a delta, and can in fact enhance shoreline rugosity in a delta by enhancing channel stability.