this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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xkcd
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There's no way that's going to hold, right?
If that picture is to scale, those bolts are ~5km thick. Put enough of them and it should hold.
That said, the crust probably starts crumbling somewhere else creating new mountains or islands
After a certain point, the material around the bolt is more brittle than the bolt itself.
Often is, but you can alleviate this with large washers like in the picture, and also by adding more bolts closer to eachothers
Would you say tectonic plates are more like wood or metal? There are different standards for both.
I'd think they're more like cookies, but idk I'm not really a geologist 😅
I think double-sided tape would be better. Or maybe we sew the plates together?
Drill holes and zip tie the tectonic plates together
Tectonic drift stitches. We'd have so much street cred in the galactic neighbourhood
Too many bolts too close and you’ve just got a perforation.
Exactly. The oceanic crust will (in geologic time) crack in front of the bolts and be dragged down parallel to the bit that was bolted, stacking the oceanic crust with the newer bit under the older one.
The cracking and stacking happens naturally and this creates stacks of many oceanic crust sections moving to the left of the picture.
At geological timescales everything is a liquid
I took an atmospheric science class in college and the professor described the field as “fast geology”, I like your description though that geology is the study of slow fluids!