3059: Water Damage

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Water Damage

Title text: Your homeowner's insurance might cover it, but be sure to check the subductible.

Explanation

This explanation is incomplete: Created by VOLCANIC ACTIVITY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Similar to 3037: Radon, Cueball is once again getting his home inspected by Ponytail. This time, she alerts Cueball for water damage, normally caused by leaky pipes or roofs. Water damage is hazardous to homes due to its ability to instigate mold and its negative impact on structural stability of the home. Instead of "regular water damage", she claims that the crust under Cueball's home suffers from water damage. The Earth's crust typically contains water; she could be referring to erosion, which is one cause of subsidence and even sinkholes, a concern to homeowners, but it soon becomes clear that she has different effects in mind.

Upon further investigation, Ponytail discovers that Cueball's home is near a subduction zone, a place where two tectonic plates meet and one pushes beneath the other and descends deep into the Earth. This leads to the formation of magma as the descending plate heats up. The expulsion of fluids, originally from seawater, from hydrated materials simultaneously lowers the melting point of the rock and allows magma to rise to the surface to form volcanoes as Ponytail alludes to (though does not entirely explain, making it seem that it is the water itself that is rising in the form of magma). However, there is nothing that Cueball can actually do about this.^{[citation needed]}

Ponytail suggests "lithospheric dehumidifiers" as a solution, which would presumably dry out the Earth's crust, but this is not realistically possible. In waterlogged ground, continuous flight augering or the injection of grouting can assist in isolating the foundations from the surrounding water table, but this has little use below the pedosphere and near-surface rock, such as down to the base of the upper plate involved in the subduction (well below the Mohorovičić discontinuity, tens of kilometers down). In addition, by drying out the crust, they might cause further subsidence and present additional hazards to the home.

An example of an area with many volcanoes caused by subduction is the Ring of Fire along the coasts of the Pacific Ocean; in the contiguous 48 states, the Cascade Volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest are the result of this type of subduction.

The title text is a pun making a portmanteau of subduction, explained above, and the deductible, the amount an insurance policy requires you to pay before it starts to contribute to the cost of the losses or expenses it covers. The title text may also be a critique of the homeowners insurance crisis in the United States at the time of the comic's posting.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete: Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Ponytail stands to the left of Cueball. She is looking down at a meter of some sort in her left hand, and is holding a clipboard in the other hand.

Ponytail: The crust under your house shows signs of water damage. Is there a subduction zone nearby?

Cueball: Uh, I think there's one off the coast.

Ponytail: Oof. I was afraid of that.

[Closeup on Ponytail who is pointing to a diagram of subducting faults.]

Ponytail: Subducting hydrous minerals carry water down into the mantle, causing melting in the overlying crust. If you let this go, you'll have volcanoes everywhere.

[Cueball, with his hand to his chin, looks at the diagram. Ponytail, holding her equipment, is standing behind him.]

Cueball: Is there any solution?

Ponytail: Giant lithospheric dehumidifiers. But the installation won't be cheap.

Cueball: Oh no...

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Discussion

I suppose that there'd be no way to make a 'no fault' claim on your policy. 141.101.98.248 18:22, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Bravo!172.70.163.15 09:57, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Will I have to buy a lithospheric humidifier if I live in a boat? 172.71.190.58 18:54, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

You might need a delithofier, or at least invest in a good earthproofing barrier. 172.69.246.137 04:30, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

So is this a series now? Should we make a tag? Mushrooms (talk) 18:56, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Probably so. Maxwell's Demon was made a category with only three examples, so I don't see why subduction can't also be a category with 1194, 1388, 1829, 2616, 3021, 3059, and almost 2987. StapleFreeBatteries (talk) 09:00, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Made a category for that with everything on your list except for 2987. DollarStoreBa'al (talk) 16:50, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

um guys, you might wanna check the new what if video Caliban (talk) 19:04, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

What is going on with the templates? TomtheBuilder (talk) 19:28, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

He's on a real geology kick lately huh. Unfortunately zero of them are funny. 162.158.154.238 19:32, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Are you kidding? He rocks! Igneously, sedimentarily and metamorphically! 172.69.195.4 21:04, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Oh, you mean ingeniously, sentimentally, and metaphorically. Yes. DKMell (talk) 02:53, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Ponytail is likely wrong here. Water leads to partial melting of the mantle above the slab, not the crust itself. Rhesus (talk) 08:15, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

An insurance company could totally defraud millions of Home and business owners by selling too cheap earthquake and volcano insurance with really long lifetimes before installing lithospheric dehumidifiers to make those phenomenons extremely rare. Homeowners beware! 162.158.103.36 13:29, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Could we make a category for house related things, with comics like this one and the fridge one and the life hacks series? genuine question I don't fully understand categories.--Calpurnia Tate (talk) 13:55, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

It can be done (not by me, but I've probably seen well over half the comic-category categories created). If you think that it's useful, I would suggest:

• Either here, below, or in the Community Portal pages, lay out your case.
• It helps if you suggest a name (or several alternatives) to encompass what you think is "a subject". Could be really broad ("Houses"), but I think you're looking to something a lot tighter. (Not quite knowing what you have in mind, so far, I'll wait until I see your next step before seriously suggesting/critiquing the possible choice(s)...)
• List the candidate comics. Obviously 3059: Water Damage, and very likely 3037: Radon, but "the fridge one" immediately reminds me of two different ones you could mean, for different reasons (possibly you'd want them both, and other 'fridge ones' I'm currently not counting!). My inkling is that some of the Life Hacks are relevent to your idea (e.g. 1494: Insurance, but maybe not for that reason), though not others. And maybe checking the existing Category:Tips (or similar) will add some (but not all) of that Cat to your list. ...in short demonstrate that "house related things" is a sane group (to which we can also attach a sane name).
• There's several people here who I know will see the fleshed out idea and might well implement it (hopefully not before others have chance to provide feedback, and... dare I suggest it... I might pop back up with steering suggestiions!). Certainly more likely to do so when justified. You should not (though people do) just add [[Some Category Name]] to the bottom of pages, seemingly at random, and hope someone will un-Redlink this Cat for you after the fact (it's harder to check what you're thinking of including).
• As and when it is set up, the resulting Cat-listing page can be freely nicified, maybe made a member of a some super-Cat, other categories made members of it and any further comics that you (and others) had accidentally not noted as equivalent can be added so easily. But we need to know where to start from. Which is up to you. (Or, having posited the possibility, someone else may jump in with a convincing grouping ...no guarantee it'll match what you think, though.)

Not the only way to procede (nor necessarily the most thorough), but a way which covers most of the bases. 172.70.91.245 15:53, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

A couple of possible suggestions that are a little more specific than 'House-related':

• 'Building Inspection' would cover these two and the fractal building plan one, but probably not the others mentioned
• 'Home Improvements' might (debatably) cover these and the one where where he's trying to use 'reverse aircon' to cool down the outside (was this 'the fridge one'?)

insert: Forgot that one! Ok, adding that to my list of possibly intended ones, together with a fourth that occured to me only as I clicked Save Changes... I'm not too far off suggesting a "Fridges" Cat, now..! ;) 141.101.98.178 16:38, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Can't think of anything that would cover all those indicated without being too vague as a category, though.172.70.163.109 16:29, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Ok! I haven't figured what the name should be, I'm just calling it houses until I can come up with something better. I got the idea from noticing that recently there have been a couple of comics relating to houses (3051: Hardwood 3037: Radon) And I was also thinking of 1077: Home Organization and 1567: Kitchen Tips--Calpurnia Tate (talk) 18:41, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Here before the bot makes omniroll into an explanation page btu after it released. 172.68.2.70 01:54, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

also here before the bot creates the omniroll page (the bot may be down) TomtheBuilder (talk) 02:11, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Looks like it got created just now. 172.69.136.138 02:33, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Don't know what the issue was, but the 'Bot picked up the image half an hour before it bothered to create the pages for it to go on. (I know, because I was here when the upload happened, and waited for the half an hour until there were pages... Not that I had much to contribute, not could I have completed the process if the 'Bot seemed that it might not do so, but just for peace of mind. And bear in mind that this was at GMT/UTC, myself, so I probably shouldn't have still been awake anyway. ;) 172.68.205.178 18:15, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
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