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Plate Flip

|< < Prev #3258 (June 12, 2026)

Title text: It's great for exfoliating your skin, bones, houses, cities, landscape, etc.

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Explanation

In this comic, Ponytail resumes her role as a cosmic home inspector.

She asks Cueball when the last time he flipped the tectonic plates, because they look heavily eroded. This may be an allusion to the practice of turning mattresses over every few months. This was common until the 20th century, to even out the wear and tear, and prevent permanent body impressions. When modern box springs became common, the practice became unnecessary.

Flipping mattresses only made sense because on a traditional mattress both sides were similar to each other. The "underside" of a tectonic plate is nothing like the surface. The current side that Cueball and Ponytail are standing on is the outermost layer of the crust. However, the "underside" of the plate reaches until the solid layer of the mantle, whose temperature can reach over 1000 °C. As Cueball points out, if you could flip a continent over, the new surface would be molten rock — not a surface suitable for life. Ponytail thinks the warmth would be soothing, and that walking on it would exfoliate your feet, but at hundreds of degrees, it would do far more damage than just removing dead skin.^{[citation needed]}

Of course, such an idea would be impossible to put into practice. The Earth's crust is far bigger than us,^{[citation needed]} and any plate-moving technologies would need an insane amount of power, much more than we have. As well as that, a location would have to be found for the plate-moving technology where it could apply sufficient leverage without destabilising its own footings. Even by doing various plates at a time, the temperature increase from moving just one plate would be deadly. The title text also reveals that somehow the crust is to be moved without moving the numerous things on it, which would further complicate matters.

Even if the immediate calamities from turning the tectonic plates upside down were ignored, the turned plate would be inhospitable to life. There would be no soil, only igneous rock, meaning no ground water could form, resulting in an immense desert. Given enough time, erosion and pioneer species would restore the geosphere. However, this would also cause the "problems" Ponytail is hoping to address to reappear.

The title text expands on this joke, saying that it would "exfoliate" just about everything on the surface (which would somehow have to stay in place while the plate below it is flipped; alternatively, everything is flipped along with the surface and ends up under the crust). If this flip was to somehow happen it would indeed do that, but it would also melt just about everything on the surface, which is less than ideal.

Transcript

[Ponytail is looking at the ground in front of her, a hand on her hip. Cueball stands behind her, to the right.]

Ponytail: These tectonic plates look pretty eroded. When did you last flip them?

Cueball: Flip them?

[Zoom out to see the ground. Ponytail walks forward, motioning at the ground. Cueball spreads his arms behind her.]

Ponytail: Yeah, to use the underside of the continent.

Cueball: ...Never?

Ponytail: Wow. Explains the eons of weathering, debris basins, and ... is this isostatic depression?

Cueball: It's rebounding!

[Ponytail stops walking and turns to Cueball.]

Ponytail: You should really flip it. You'll get a whole new landscape!

Cueball: But I like this landscape!

[Ponytail spreads her arms slightly.]

Ponytail: Just think how warm and fresh the other side will feel.

Cueball: A sea of molten rock?

Ponytail: Good for the feet. Helps exfoliate.

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