xkcd #3132: Coastline Similarity
Title text:
Hey! A bunch of the early Cretaceous fossils on each coast seem to have been plagiarized, too!
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3132/
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
353 points (98.6% liked)
xkcd
13171 readers
192 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It would not. The mass of the Earth doesn't change, and angular momentum is conserved.
I was curious since mass would seem lopsided. I guess not enough. Thanks for answering.
My layman's understanding is that the water mostly makes up for it, and that more wobble comes from the moon than any inconsistency in land-mass distribution
The crust of the earth is relatively thinner than the skin of an apple from my understanding. So I wouldn't expect anything happening on the crust to have a huge impact on that kind of behavior. Granted, even small changes could be noticable.
That's a great point. When it comes to the Earth's mass, the surface is barely a factor.