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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

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 makes sense because both sides are similar to each other, but the "underside" of a 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 do. The Earth's crust is far bigger than us, and any plate-moving technologies would need an insane amount of power, much more than we have. As well as that, it would be impossible to flip the whole crust over, as the plate-moving technology would have to be on part of it! Even by doing various plates at a time, the temperature increase from moving just one of them would already 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.

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). 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.^{[citation needed]}

Transcript

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

Cueball: Flip them?

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

Cueball: But I like this landscape!

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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