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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.
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