3303: Slab Graveyard

Slab Graveyard

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Title text: It's ok if you want to close close your eyes for the slab graveyard, so you can still have fun riding the mantle plume back up afterward!

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Explanation

A popular Halloween activity is visiting cemeteries and telling ghost stories, traditionally after dark.

However, 'graveyard' is also often used figuratively to refer to a place where obsolete or unused objects are kept; for instance, a junkyard might be called an 'automobile graveyard' because junked cars end up there. In the comic, Beret Guy refers to one of the terms used for the area where portions of the Earth's lithosphere end up after subduction. (Beret Guy makes the common error of referring to the subducted slabs as crust, whereas tectonic plates are more correctly described as slabs of the lithosphere, which is made of both crust and the underlying, relatively rigid, lithospheric mantle.) Being Beret Guy, he confuses the slab graveyard for a real graveyard, conflating these two kinds of cemeteries, and says that he and his friends are going to go there on Halloween. Ordinarily tectonic processes are really slow, with such a 'ride' taking millions of years. However, in typical fashion for Beret Guy, he just sees this as an opportunity to tell more ghost stories. This would be well beyond a normal person's lifespan, but Beret Guy may be less subject to ageing than normal.

Beret Guy might not be worried because one of his established attributes is a subduction license, which allows him to both speed up the process and apparently survive being surrounded by rock / magma. It's possible that at least some of Beret Guy's friends have similar powers, or it might be the case that none of his friends are interested and that he hasn't asked all of them yet (thus not realizing that they aren't immortal). It is also unclear if the subduction license would allow Beret Guy to confer his resistance to the heat and pressure at the bottom of the mantle (3,700°C–4,200°C, or about 6,700°F–7,600°F, and 1.34 million atmospheres) to his fellow travelers, or if Beret Guy is unaware of the dangers such travel poses to ordinary persons. (Metamorphic rock is formed by transforming other rocky substances under much less drastic conditions of heat and pressure than those found at the bottom of the mantle. Apart from the direct effects of heat and pressure, under such conditions, a human body would react chemically with the surrounding material.)

The title text has more of Beret Guy trying to persuade Cueball to see the graveyard. Believing Cueball is just scared, as one tends to be when exploring a graveyard, he encourages him by saying they will ride a mantle plume back to the surface. This falls in with a typical trait of his, of naively going about not understanding the potential pitfalls, such as realising that the centre of the Earth is far too hot for human survival, and similarly with the mantle plumes, which would eventually lead to them being returned to the surface through a volcanic eruption. In Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth the protagonists return to the surface in a similar manner, rising inside a volcanic chimney that ultimately spews them out via an eruption of the Stromboli volcano.

Transcript

[Cueball is talking to Beret Guy.]

Cueball: Any plans for Halloween?

Beret Guy: Me and my friends are gonna check out a slab graveyard!

[The next panel has no characters and the art is only in the bottom half, compared with the other panels. In it, there is a diagram showing a portion of the Earths crust. It shows a subduction, where the seafloor, under water, is pushed into the mantle as it moves under the mountains on the continental plate. Portions of the crust is shown falling down into the mantle, and at the bottom it piles up on the top of the core. There are clouds above the surface. Cueball and Beret Guy's voices come from off-panel and is written in a frame-less section above this half height panel. Their voices emanating left and right from two starbursts.]

Cueball (off-panel): What's that?

Beret Guy (off-panel): When dense crust subducts, geologists think it might pile up at the bottom of the mantle.

[Back to Cueball and Beret Guy who has his arms spread wide out.]

Beret Guy: We're going to hide in the crust and ride it down to see.

Beret Guy: Wanna come?

Beret Guy: It's gonna be spooky!

[Cueball and Beret Guy stands normal as in the first panel.]

Cueball: Won't that take millions of years?

Beret Guy: Lots of time for ghost stories!

Cueball: I think I'm good.

Beret Guy: Too spooky? I understand.

Trivia

There is a typo in the title text: the word "close" is repeated.

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Discussion

Trivia time: "close close" dittography in the title text. --2001:A62:518:1001:61EF:DCF5:C3C0:A037 16:30, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

I was trying to work out if it was a reference to a song-lyric where a key word is repeated. (Like "It's a man's man's man's world!") But what that might actually be escapes me for the moment.

Or if it was a valid statement using two different meanings of "close" (a 'clowse' pronunciation, i.e. "near to", and 'clowze', i.e. "to shut", for example. Like "I'll close the carriage's connecting door only when we're close to the station". Or even a nearby dead-end road being a "close close" (both being 'clowse'). But I haven't yet worked out an actual intentional and viable-but-confusing meeting.

Perhaps one or other will occur to someone. 81.179.197.66 19:15, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

An alternative meaning for 'close' (with the soft 's' pronunciation) is 'tightly', so it's entirely possible to close your eyes close (even if Randall never actually intended that). 82.13.184.33 08:29, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I added a transcript, but I don't think I did the diagram justice. Someone please update that. Barmar (talk) 17:13, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Anyone else so inunduated to Beret Guy's weird powers that their first reaction was that he's got friends going along with this? 207.195.86.17 19:02, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Yeah... glad to see he's with more of his kind though. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 23:56, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

one of beret guy's stange powers 24.4.232.148 03:25, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

This got me thinking about dropping a big tungsten football into an active volcano or something with a direct path to the mantle. Possibly it would be better to have layers of halfnium carbide or other ceramics that will be less reactive with molten rock. Apparently there have been proposals to do things like this with a radioactive material in the nosecone to melt any solidified rock that gets in the way. I wonder if the temperature gradient (with the molten mantle as the cold heatsink, lol) could be used to power the system, maybe thermo-electric, and if it could even run a refrigerator so a science payload could survive better. Gemini AI suggested very high temperature semiconductors could exist or some kind of microfluidics based computer. The proposals suggest an internal hammer sending acoustic signals to sensors on the surface. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2013/07/31/earth-core-probe-as-controlled-china-syndrome/?sh=32973fa9af2d https://rdcu.be/nAV8kHNrv4Xa 136.226.19.50 20:57, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Is Randall going through a bit of a geology phase at the moment? Feels like there's been a few on that recently. Maybe we should have a Geology category... Alcatraz ii (talk) 21:31, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

I think he's certainly rocking it, right now. 81.179.197.66 21:44, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Agreed Waldronjwf (talk) 00:36, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I have added a sentence explaining that tectonic plates are correctly described as "lithosphere". The "crust" is the portion of the plate above the moho. The crust varies in thickness from less than 10 km beneath the oceans to 30–40 km beneath the continents, whereas the lithosphere is typically 100 km or more thick, as it includes a slab of relatively rigid "lithospheric upper mantle" too. Beret Guy's terminology reflects reflects a common misconception in geology. – -- waldronjwf (talk) 00:28, 28 September 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I swear Beret Guy's last name is "Frizzle". Fephisto (talk) 18:30, 28 September 2026 (UTC)
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