Main Page
Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!
We have an explanation for all 3004 xkcd comics,
and only 5
(0%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!
Latest comic
| Wells |
 Title text: You do have to be careful, though--sometimes, instead of water, you hit this free fuel that you can sell for a lot of money instead. |
Explanation
|
This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a MAGICALLY WATERLOGGED OIL DRILL - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
Water is essential to life, and humans have long sought out places to get it. Freshwater surface sources like rivers and lakes most obviously dictate where people live, but are subject to changes of quantity and quality (e.g. the seasons/weather and what other people are doing with(/in) the water, upstream). Water can also be present beneath the surface in aquifers, gradually having soaked through into various soil and/or rock layers, and may emerge (far more reliably and usably) from handy seeps and springs where the local ground topology is favorable. But geology and geography don't coincide so usefully everywhere that someone requires water.
Many modern countries (and a number of historic ones) will have at least some ability to pipe water from areas of high availability (e.g. from areas with reservoirs, natural or constructed) to other places of higher consumption (towns and cities), but not everyone will have piped water and may find it better to rely upon a well, a hole dug into the ground, deep enough to reach the local water to lift or pump out as needed. A borehole is similar, but may even puncture impermeable bedrock to access water held (under significant pressure) in rock layers below.
This comic pokes fun of the seemingly improbable characteristics of wells and boreholes; talking about how water "randomly" forms below the surface of the ground and how they "magically" refill themselves. In reality the complex systems of the water cycle dictate the formation of the underground 'pools' that the wells take from and the seeps of underground water that supply them, meaning that it's not really so surprising (nor necessarily quite as simple as it sounds) to get your water from beneath the ground, and is a process not restricted to humans. This theme of things that seem like they shouldn't work, but do, has also been used in 2540: TTSLTSWBD, 2115: Plutonium, and 2775: Siphon, among others.
The title text points out that in some cases, people intending to drill water wells instead found oil beds. Oil is a very valuable energy source, so they became very wealthy as a result. This is the source of the idiom "struck oil" to mean receiving a windfall as a result of a lucky occurrence. But you have to be careful — if you blindly "drink whatever you find at the bottom", as Megan says, you'll get very sick if it's oil rather than water. Oil tends to be buried much deeper than water, but each has their own (different) prerequisites that don't make it equally likely to get either (or both) at any given spot. A prior comic made some related points about ground-hydrology.
This comic bears similarity to a Calvin and Hobbes comic from 1993, Randall may have been aware of, in that it points out properties of a common natural drink that can appear disgusting when the underpinnings are left out.
Transcript
|
|
This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
- [Megan is on the left hand side and is facing Cueball who is on the right side and facing her. Megan has her left hand raised.]
- Megan: I need water, so I think I'll dig a deep hole and drink whatever liquid I find at the bottom.
- Cueball: What will you do after you drink it all? Dig another hole?
- Megan: I dunno. Hopefully it magically refills itself or something.
- [Caption below the panel:]
- It's ridiculous that wells work.
Is this out of date? .
New here?
Last 7 days (Top 10) |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd. Feel free to sign up for an account and contribute to the wiki! We need explanations for comics, characters, themes and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd web comic, it should be here.
- If you're new to wiki editing, see the explain xkcd:Editor FAQ for a specific guidance to this Wiki and the more general help on how to edit wiki pages. There's also a handy wikicode cheatsheet.
- Discussion about the wiki itself happens at the Community portal.
- You can browse the comics from List of all comics or by navigating the category tree at Category:Comics.
- There are incomplete explanations listed here. Feel free to help out by expanding them!
Rules
Don't be a jerk!
There are a lot of comics that don't have set-in-stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.
If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.
Please only submit material directly related to (and helping everyone better understand) xkcd... and of course only submit material that can legally be posted (and freely edited). Off-topic or other inappropriate content is subject to removal or modification at admin discretion, and users who repeatedly post such content will be blocked.
If you need assistance from an admin, post a message to the Admin requests board.
