3141: Mantle Model

Mantle Model

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Title text: Mantle plumes explain Hawaii, Yellowstone, Iceland, the East African Rift, the Adirondack uplift, the Permian extinction, the decline of Rome, the DB Cooper hijacking, and the balrog in Moria. Those little hills of sand in your yard are caused by antle plumes.

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Explanation

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This page was created by Pele, the goddess of volcanoes and fire. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

A mantle plume is a flow of magma upward from deep in the Earth toward the surface. Some plumes are thought to come close to the surface and result in hotspots that produce volcanoes, such as the hotspot that formed the Hawaiian Islands chain. Here Randall says the plumes account for every surface feature on Earth that we can't otherwise account for.

The title text extends this further, suggesting with increasing absurdity that mantle plumes account other things:

• Hawaii. A hotspot, hypothesized to sit atop a mantle plume, did indeed create the Hawaiian Islands.
• Yellowstone. This area of hot springs, geysers, and other geothermal phenomena is in the Yellowstone Caldera, which many geologists believe sits atop a mantle plume.
• The East African Rift. This area in East Africa is a developing divergent tectonic plate boundary where the African plate is in the process of splitting into two tectonic plates.
• The Adirondack uplift. The Adirondack Mountains were raised by the collision of tectonic plates. Some geologists believe that tectonic plates are in turn driven, in part, by mantle plumes.
• The Permian extinction, also called the 'Great Dying' and more formally as the Permian-Triassic extinction event, is the largest of the "big five" mass extinctions since vertebrate life appeared on Earth. There are several hypotheses as to why it happened, once of which, Siberian Traps volcanism, could have happened because of a mantle plume.
• The decline of Rome refers to the end of the Roman Empire, which had nothing to do with mantle plumes.
• The DB Cooper hijacking happened in 1971 that remains unsolved. Dan B. Cooper is an alias of the hijacker, whose real name is also unknown. The hijacking had nothing to do with mantle plumes.
• The balrog in Moria is a fictional beast in J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium that first appeared in The Lord of the Rings. It too has nothing to do with mantle plumes, though it does live deep underground.

Transcript

This is one of 27 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

A diagram of the Earth’s inner structure is shown with the caption “Standard geophysical model of the mantle”. Dotted lines forming structures that appear to be moving through and between various layers of the mantle are labeled with arrows. The arrows either point to the base of the structures on the inside of the planet or formations on the outside.

In the center around the Earth’s core are vertical columns rising up from the core through gaps in the various layers and spreading horizontally out between different layers. Some of these horizon structures continue up smaller cracks produce more vertical columns and some further horizontal structures still. These are labeled “hypothesis mantle plumes”.

On the Earth’s surface are various rock formations that align with the locations of plumes just below. The formations are labeled, “Every feature of the Earth surface that we have a hard time explaining”.

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Discussion

xkcd outage discussion

The wiki lives! 🥹 Caliban (talk) 21:04, 12 September 2025 (UTC) FINALLY, WE’RE BACK《プロキシ》(XKCD中毒者) 13:12, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

So it wasn't just my computer that wouldn't show explain xkcd? BobcatInABox (talk) 21:35, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Also: what went wrong and how did they fix it? BobcatInABox (talk) 21:35, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

And: do we have a plan in case it happens again? BobcatInABox (talk) 21:35, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

It was clearly a server-side issue. (Well, more server-side than Cloudflare, which still covers a lot of ground.( There are a number of different things that could have been wrong, from the server rack-space no longer being paid for (a potentially more permanent death than the domain not being paid for - which we know has been, anyway) to someone having been messing about with the site and caused fatally excessive parsing errors (there's no sign of that, in the page-edit history that we see, although there's always a potential for the person who got the server working 'sensibly' again to have purged the evidence along with the problem).

Could also have just been a temporary power-outage/blown-fuse in the apartment of the person who currently lets the server hum away in the background (if that's the server's physical location, which I doubt) or that person was moving it from one residence to another and so obviously had to unplug it, transport it and plug it back in again to power and network connection (again, from what I know, I doubt that... but it's not an impossible scenario).

Unless we get to hear from whoever fixed the problem, we can just keep on guessing.

Assuming that any actual person did fix the problem rather than (for yet another theory...) it being a connectivity issue further along the chain that just happened to catch our server in that, and was just sorted out as a more general restorating of service.

I had several 'likely' ideas during the downtime... Well, obvious they couldn't all be actually likely, as they were mutually exclusive to each other, but a larger share of the divided percentages than some of the more out-there ones... but very little proof of any of them, now we're up and running again. Not ruled out, but without the basic fingerprints that I'd have expected to support their realities. And some of my imagined solutions to the outage were situations where I would not actually have expected the site to return at all, too, and these have obviously been defied/subverted given that we're now talking here about this.

The good news (with reservations, at least) is that, the way we've been returned to 'normality', this raises the chances of this issue not being a recurring one. With a side-line chance of if whatever-it-was recurs, it'll be solved far quicker next time. Whoever/whatever we have to thank for it.

The bad news is that I don't think anyone 'active' has anything to do with it (please do let us know, if you did!). Either no direct hands-on fix at all, as described, or someone who really doesn't want to bother talking to us users and only steps/stepped in for a bit of quiet background fixing that nobody'll properly appreciate. (My kind of person, that, actually. I rather like it when I fix issues so that nobody besides my more immediate colleagues knows they've been fixed... although ideally I'd be doing so before anyone even knew they needed fixing. And this wasn't my work, of course. With so little access, or even familiarity with the basic setup, you'd have to look elsewhere for any mysterious house-elf who sorted this one out.)

TL;DR; - I don't know how to answer your question. I get the idea that nobody will answer your question as long as anyone who knows doesn't want to. I don't eventhink there's any possible plan that we can devise to deal with it. Even with an 'off-wiki' forum to talk amongst ourselves about things, the next time this happens again. Even if we could agree on where to go, it'd just end up being a legacy chatroom (like the Euphoria one) once the inevitable day comes when something means that this site goes dark and never lights up again. C'est la vie, etc... 92.17.62.87 00:28, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

TLDR indeed. >"the apartment of the person who currently lets the server hum away in the background (if that's the server's physical location, which I doubt)" Elsewhere this year we learned of a forum which actually sat in the admin's garage. He had a health issue, weeks in hospital then months recovering at a relative's house. Forum went down. His #2 said he got some better and the forum came to life, but went down again. Life is like that. --PRR (talk) 02:48, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

I had noticed this issue too. I was actually drafting up an email to User:Davidy22 when I came back on here to get a screenshot and Cloudflare started working again! I had suspected that we were getting DDoSed, since Explain XKCD had some issues with that before and the server was clearly down across multiple devices and networks. Recent Changes also shows a 36+ hour gap between editing, confirming that the server was down across the board. I suggest that we coordinate some other form of communication so that we can share messages with each other and still have points of contact if this goes down. Jeff has proven himself to be flaky and unreliable, and I'm now treating everyday on here like it's my last. Check the proposals board for more info. 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 06:02, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

This seems to be a recurring feature of many sites at the moment, whether behind Cloudflare or not. My suspicion is that scraping for AI is out of control, acting as a particularly stupid (vibe-coded) and well-funded DDoS. --81.96.108.67 06:58, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Cloudflare was working on my error page. It looked like it was just the host server with a problem《プロキシ》(XKCD中毒者) 13:12, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Comic discussion

La plume de la Terre est sous le bureau de mon oncle. BunsenH (talk) 21:33, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm truly shocked that this comic (#3141) didn't have anything (obvious) to do with pi. 2603:3003:BCC:6200:FC4E:5757:BC86:E656 02:03, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Off by 0.001 error. Or maybe Randall's sworn off pi/pee jokes. Perhaps we'll see when comic 3142 is released to the wild. 2605:59C8:160:DB08:925:A1C6:D2C8:428B 11:51, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Only off by 0.001 if we're aware of the additional digits. I choose ignorance. 2603:3003:BCC:6200:98AA:C11E:AA31:F089 15:56, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

I assume those that manage this great resource for those of us that REALLY NEED xckd explained know comic 3139 got missed in the kerfuffle... 209.240.124.28 02:09, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Using the ^{[citation needed]} tag FOUR times in a single explanation is not funny. ^{[citation needed]} These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 01:13, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Counterpoint: Yes it is. Theclapp (talk) 19:25, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Synthesis: It could be, but wasn't here. 82.13.184.33 08:30, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

😆 Theclapp (talk) 13:00, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

My interpretation of the comic was that it was more of a satire on geology and how it interprets mantle plumes rather than just some random absurd thing. After all, looking at the Wikipedia page for mantle plumes, it lists like 10 totally random things that geologists sometimes attribute to mantle plumes. Qoiuoiuoiu (talk) 02:54, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

There is too much truth in this cartoon, see [1] to get an overview over the problems of the competing plume hypotheses. In short, yes geologists made up so many different plume models that this term has become either all-encompassing or meaningless. 87.180.165.87 07:38, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

I like that the title text seems to also suggest that Mantle should properly be pronounced Mega-antle 2001:1C05:71D:AB00:49C6:27F5:15E6:49C4 09:53, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

To my knowledge, D. B. isn't an "alias" of the plane hijacker but more of a cultural nickname. The hijacker named himself "Dan Cooper" (an European comic about a pilot. Relevancy never proved or disproved by the FBI according to Wikipedia) while D. B. Cooper was a random person misnamed by the media? 91.181.199.112 (talk) 12:12, 15 September 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Yep, D.B. Cooper is a nickname given by a reporter that stuck, after the composite drawing was released. But back to the comic, this case could have been made much harder in 1980 due to a mantle plume. LOTS of stuff got buried under ash in the Mt. St. Helens eruption in May of 1980.Seebert (talk) 15:47, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Forgive me if I'm off base here, but isn't this one a joke about Dark Matter? 12:54, 15 September 2025 (UTC) It seems like a Dark Matter joke to me too 136.62.202.91 18:18, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

He did this whole comic just so he could do the "antle plumes" pun in the title text, didn't he? Theclapp (talk) 19:25, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

I am a bit surprised of the passive/agressive tone of this explanation. Is it simply me not being good enough in english ? 66.159.217.128 (talk) 14:49, 16 September 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It makes no sense to put [citation needed] on something being unconfirmed. Either say that mantle plumes have no shadow aspect[citation needed] or just leave it as being unconfirmed without the need for citation. Kapten-N (talk) 14:19, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure if that was even meant as a [Citation needed] (tongue-in-cheek, for humour) or [Actual citation needed] (the real thing), at least as far as whatever the tag is attached to. I'd be tempted to remove that and/or reword the text to make the intended serious/funny sense more obvious. 81.179.195.93 18:58, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
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