Editing 2155: Swimming

{{comic
| number    = 2155
| date      = May 27, 2019
| title     = Swimming
| before = [[#Explanation|↓ Skip to explanation ↓]]
| image     = swimming.png
| titletext = "You don't know how high above you the sky goes, but you're not freaking out about that." "Well, NOW I am!"
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is about an irrational fear about the depth of water beneath oneself, also known as {{w|thalassophobia}}. Whenever you don't explicitly know how deep the water is, and cannot see the bottom, there is nothing preventing the sea/lake/riverbed from being exceptionally far away. This phenomenon is actually quite common with many bodies of water having a relatively shallow shelf extending a short ways out from land. These typically end with little to no warning, giving rise to the fear that is depicted here.

It is an '''irrational''' fear because if one is swimming, the depth of the water underneath is not important to safety as long as one can reliably get back to shore. (This fear may be due to excessively worrying about what happens if one stops swimming, thinking that walking should be safer because almost everyone spends more time walking than swimming, ignoring the fact that the safest thing to do in this case is to keep swimming.) If one is wading, presumably one would feel the bottom drop away. Following the safety saying "Walk out, swim back" would help avoid this situation.

Here, [[Megan]] and [[Cueball]] are in the ocean, with Cueball treading water and Megan standing on the seabed, with another girl in the water and another Cueball watching from the beach. Megan mentions that she can still touch bottom, thus thinking it is safe. In front of her however the seabed drops off steeply, becoming nearly vertical. Fish and jellyfish are in the water below, while at the bottom of the frame, but not the sea floor, a small ledge holds an octopus and a beach umbrella. The beach umbrella may be from the beach, to give human scale, though it could also be a {{w|Lemmings (video game)|Lemmings}} reference.

The title text alludes to the fact that humans live at or near the bottom of a vast sea of air: the atmosphere.  Every day, most people never rise far from the floor of the atmosphere.  However, this is nowhere near as perilous as descending to the bottom of a sea of water.  Indeed, surviving a rise to the top of the atmosphere requires life support measures.  Also, unlike in water, humans are far too dense to "swim" (fly) in the atmosphere.

===Interesting facts===

* Assuming the height of characters is 1.7 m, the depth of the shallows is about 1.1 m, and the ledge is 77 m deep.

===Related comics===
* In [[731: Desert Island]] a similar vision of not knowing what is beneath the surface is depicted.
* Randall provided the depths of various bodies of water without mentioning any specific fears in [[1040: Lakes and Oceans]].
* The title text may be a reference to [[1115: Sky]], where [[Megan]] similarly starts freaking out about the depth of the sky.
* The ''[[what if? (blog)|what if?]]'' article ''[https://what-if.xkcd.com/103/ Vanishing Water]'' covers what would happen if all the bodies of water vanished.  It refers to the sharp drop-off of the continental shelf, and divides boats into two categories: those over the shelf that crash within a few seconds, and those past the shelf that take up to a minute to reach bottom.

==Transcript==
:[The single panel comic is around 4 times higher than it is wide (317&times;1284 pixels). A Cueball is watching from the beach while Megan with another character is standing neck deep in water near an extreme drop off (continental shelf?) and another Cueball is swimming further, and there is a fish behind him. This part of the comic is at the very top, and the characters are drawn much smaller than usual.]

:Megan: It's OK, I can still touch bottom here.

:[As the tall image is scrolled down, there is a school of three fish, a jellyfish, a single deep-water fish, an octopus, a bottom ledge with a toppled beach umbrella on it, and another drop off. The second drop is mostly cut off by the edge of the panel.]

:[Caption below the panel:]
:I love swimming, but occasionally I realize I don't know how deep the water under me is and it freaks me out.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Large drawings‏‎]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]