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Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Scary Triangles
Concealed mostly beneath the surface, sharks are the icebergs of the sea.
Title text: Concealed mostly beneath the surface, sharks are the icebergs of the sea.

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by the Bermuda Triangle - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

Cueball is giving a lecture about sharks and seems to mix up icebergs with the topic. In pop culture, sharks will often approach prey or people with only their front dorsal fin, which looks like a triangle, above the water. As far as prey are concerned, this is inaccurate, as most sharks will attack from below to keep the element of surprise. In this case, the joke is that Cueball hasn't understood that a shark doesn't always have their dorsal fin above water. He thus concludes that sharks are 90% undiscovered (i.e. the rest of the shark's body.) However, Cueball seems to have already drawn the outline of the shark's body, indicating that he already knows the shape of the shark.

Meanwhile, icebergs are usually described as having 90% of their volume underwater.

The title text continues the joke explicitly saying that sharks are icebergs of the sea, except icebergs are already of the sea.

Transcript

Ambox notice.png This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.
[Cueball points with a stick to a poster behind him that has a diagram of a shark in the water with some unreadable labels pointing to its dorsal fin and gills. The outlines of the shark under the water are in dashed lines.]
Cueball: Today's marine biology lecture is on sharks. We all know them as the scary triangles of the sea, but recent research has revealed that the triangle is only a small portion of the shark - over 90% of it is hidden beneath the surface.


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