XKCD's "Lakes and Oceans" chart of the other 70% of the planet

Randall Munroe's produced another in his series of his spectacular, gigantic charts of unimaginably large and complex things compared and rendered tractable by the human imagination. "Lakes and Oceans" has everything you need to cultivate an appreciation for the vasty depths and the ocean blue. Plus, a snarfworthy punchline at the deepest depths.

Lake and Oceans

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Funny • geography • happy mutants • infographic • map • Science • wide • xkcd

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corydodt

The hovertext was positively Lovecraftian. Well done, Randall.
- oldtaku
  
  It’s as good an explanation for My Heart Will Go On as anything else I’ve heard.
  - http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
    
    I wish they’d put Celine back down there.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Unfortunately, her heart will probably go on. And on. And on.
anando

I always envisioned the Mariana as more of a trench. Certainly seems less dramatic now.
- howaboutthisdangit
  
  I dunno. It looks disturbingly cold and lonely to me.
franko

no lake tahoe : (
- jimh
  
  Yeah I second that, it would have been nice to have Tahoe on there. 501 meters isn’t too shabby!
sisyphus321

Freddy Mercury and David Bowie?
- Running Pinata
  
  They’re under lots of pressure.
  - http://twitter.com/InnerPartisan Sebastian Spinczyk
    
    Also, at least one of them might have got down and made love.
- Mark Dow
  
  “Under Pressure”
- mesocosm
  
  Ditto. What’s up with that? “Under Pressure” reference?
  - Mister44
    
    ”It’s the terror of knowing what this abyssal plain is about,
    Watching James Cameron scream ‘Let me out!’”
    - David Walker
      
      Um bum ba de
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

Whenever I read “Marianas Trench” I picture it full of spaghetti sauce.

* * *
But seriously: Brilliant comic.
- legotech
  
  When we lived in Boston, we tried a few different “great” restaurants in the North End (Italian part of town) and decided that the entire neighborhood was on top of the Marinara Trench and all the restaurants just pumped their sauce from there. We couldn’t figure out how else every single place would have the same “homemade” sauce :)
chgoliz

Is there a higher quality resolution version somewhere (other than the XKCD site) so that it’s readable once embiggened?

People can stay on my lawn, I just would like to be able to read the small print. Yes, I’m using my bi-focals. No, they’re not helping.
- dculberson
  
  Why “other than the XKCD site?” If you go there and click on the comic it is 2,592px × 1,728px which is plenty big to read even for bi-focal wearers.
  - Guest
    
    and for free, which should head off complaints about the ice cream,
- LaylaSV
  
  I didn’t know you could click on it either and was coming to post the same thing. Go click on the chart – it’s lovely.
  - chgoliz
    
    I did click on the chart, and it wasn’t enough (I find that wavery handwriting very difficult to read) so I manually zoomed. A second click worked much better. I’ve never needed to double click on that site before today. Now I know….thanks, guys!
    - C.J. Hayes
      
      Depending on your browser, it might resize the image to fit the screen by default, which is why you’d need the second click.
  - http://www.tumbleweed.net/ tyger11
    
    Welcome to the World Wide Web. Pro-tip: if you don’t know if something is clickable, click on it.
    - C.J. Hayes
      
      Pro(er)-tip: don’t just click on everything because you don’t know if it’s clickable. That’s the fast track to malware and trojans.
http://plagmada.org Tim H

All the depth and it only takes the first 6′ or so to drown you.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/George-Herbert/100001916116969 George Herbert
  
  Six inches or so, not six feet. And people can drown in less water than that.
  - gadgetphile
    
    “I think the problem was that we had a stonehenge monument that was in danger of being trampled … by a dwarf”
Ipo

I really, really want to know what James Cameron found behind that mysterious door.
I bet whatever it is, it was worth going solo for.
- http://www.tumbleweed.net/ tyger11
  
  That’s where the Stargate currently is.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    Naw, it’s his stash of VHS copies of Piranha 2: The Spawning. Guess his last one must have worn out.
ObeyMyBrain

Crater Lake doesn’t seem accurate for it’s height above sea level. It’s also missing Wizard Island. The Dead Sea is shown being below sea level and the Great Lakes at a couple steps above, so shouldn’t Crater Lake’s surface be about 7000 ft above sea level?
RadioSilence

Is that a tiny Niagara Falls between Lakes Erie and Ontario? :D
Jason Baker

Question that’s been bugging me today… Randall lists “Pressure at this depth would pop the cork into a champagne bottle” well above the Titanic. Yet, the article on the Titanic in this month’s National Geographic listed a champagne bottle “with the cork still in it” as one of the artifacts recovered from the wreck. Did they mean “the cork was completely inside the bottle” or did they mean that it was still intact? Brief interneting seems to indicate the bottle was intact. So was this a goof, or is there more at work here than meets the eye? (I imagine that it could have been more-carbonated-than-usual, but not THAT MUCH more-carbonated-than-usual).
- http://tumblr.breadteam.com breadteam
  
  I wonder if it means a champagne bottle full of air, not champagne.
  - Jason Baker
    
    That would make a lot more sense, given the other things occurring relative to the depth. Thanks!
  - Guido Schlabitz
    
    Yes, it must be an empty champagne bottle, because liquids are virtually impossible to compress.
  - legotech
    
    Wonder if they mean that the wire cage and wax seal were intact? Like making a paper mache wrap around a balloon and then popping the balloon leaving the ‘cast’ still shaped like the balloon? Maybe the wire wrap is still in the shape of the cork? I dunno, I’m over thinking this I’m sure….
- AlexG55
  
  Champagne corks are asymmetric and sort of mushroom-shaped with the “cap” of the mushroom on the outside, so the cork wouldn’t actually go in. I think that the pressure down there may be equal to that in a (shaken?) champagne bottle, though.
ocker3

I’m thinking about those whales that fight with the squid, perhaps we could send down teams of some kinda of cameras and have it be like boxing matches (but lethal)?
grimatongueworm

Note to self – Do not f#ck with the Emperor Penguins.
- legotech
  
  HOLY COW, no doubt! Now we totally have to train Emperor Penguins to swim INTO nuke sub torpedo tubes and sabotage the subs!!!
http://tumblr.breadteam.com breadteam

Question: what’s the little horizontal line at ~1500m, between the aircraft carrier and the Titanic?
- pKp
  
  An easter egg.
  
  I’ll give you a clue: what interesting, geek-related number is located between 1250 and 1500 ?
http://profiles.google.com/chudez Ted Bautista

re. “The Abyss” — is this a reference to the James Cameron movie or is there such an underwater geological feature called “The Abyss”?

also, yes, it’s rude to stare. which explains why it stares back.
niktemadur

Obligatory xkcd reference: First the “Gravity Wells” strip ( http://xkcd.com/681/ ), now this.
Gotta love Randall, one of the good guys.
TooGoodToCheck

I’m kind of blown away by the knowledge that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in water that was shallower than it was long.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1050215206 Brian McCooley
  
  I remember that realization with the Kursk. It must have been frustrating knowing that if they could only stand the sub up, they could get out.
  - niktemadur
    
    Frustrating? More like heart-shattering.
- CLamb
  
  The Edmund Fitzgerald sank was because it was in shallow water in a storm. The water became so rough that when the ship went into a trough it slammed the entire bottom of the ship against the lake floor. If it had been in deeper water it likely would’ve survived.
dnebdal

Also, this underlines just how technologically impressive platform-based oil drilling really is, even if it sometimes goes horribly wrong.

The north sea condeep platforms around here are up to 300m tall structures standing on the ocean floor, drilling down another 2.5 km or so. Impressive enough, but the sheer well depth is dwarfed by the really deep ones (like the deeper end of the Gulf of Mexico projects).
schrutzki

Hmm,

I’m missing the French research Sub “Nautile” and the Japanese “Shinkai 6500″ which
routinely go (manned) down to 6000 and 6500 meters respectively. Which makes over 90% of the ocean floor accessible. Personally, I find that more awesome than the 400 additional Bar that Mr. Cameron endured once. No doors down there at 650Bar, though …
eerd

And with growing importance. The share of deepwater oil as part of the world’s total is set to increase, basically as we run out of easier onshore oil and much of the Middle East is offlimits to exploration.
- eerd
  
  Oops. That was meant to be a reply to dnebdal.
http://twitter.com/spylark hapa

at some point i figured that if you drew the pacific ocean from edge to edge on a regular sheet of paper then cut along your outline, the thickness of the paper was approximately to scale with the average depth.