Volcano Types
It's hard living somewhere with antlions, because every time you find one of their traps, you feel compelled to spend all day constructing a tiny model of Jabba's sail barge next to it.
It's hard living somewhere with antlions, because every time you find one of their traps, you feel compelled to spend all day constructing a tiny model of Jabba's sail barge next to it.
This comic presents a table of 12 different types of volcano. Split into 3 rows, the first 4 are authentic types of volcano; while the remaining 8 are parodies, one not even trying to represent a volcano but shows a real animal in its inverted trap cone.
Volcanoes have featured in many xkcd comics, most prominently in the left part of the world (the Lord of the Rings section) of 1608: Hoverboard. This comic's volcano looks like it could soon turn into a Somma volcano.
Real volcanoes
- Cinder cone: small, steep-sided volcano formed of scoria and ash.
- Shield volcano: wide, rounded volcano formed of solidified lava flow.
- Stratovolcano: large volcano formed of layers (strata) from multiple eruptions.
- Somma volcano: new volcanic cone in the middle of an old collapsed volcanic crater.
Joke volcanoes
- Metasomma volcano: nested layers of somma volcanos i.e. a whole set of new volcanoes (three in this situation) formed inside of old ones. "Meta" is a prefix that often denotes recursion. (Although this is a joke volcano, metasomma volcanoes do actually exist in real life, with one example being the Krakatoa group in Indonesia.)
- Waffle cone: type of pastry that ice cream is served in, related to volcano cones only insofar as they are the same shape, but typically the waffle cones are turned the other way up to keep the ice cream inside. If the tip of the waffle cone is not filled with solid chocolate or similar, then the contents may very well melt and run out the bottom like the smoke coming out at the very tip of the Waffle cone volcano.
- Science fair cone: common elementary science experiment that is often used as a project for science fairs. A structure is built to resemble a model volcano and is filled with a mix of baking soda, vinegar, and sometimes food coloring. The reaction between baking soda and vinegar quickly produces a large amount of carbon dioxide, creating a foam that overflows and mimics a volcanic eruption. In this picture, there are people running away from the volcano that are much smaller than it. This is likely a reference to 1611: Baking Soda and Vinegar, either the scale-model people on the first volcano, or real people running from the baking soda supervolcano (in this case two Cueball-like guys and Megan).
- Doot cone: This may likely be a reference to the meme of the skull-trumpet where the trumpet playing skull produces the sound Doot as a large part of the meme. Doot is also a fart sound; a doot cone could be just ejecting farts instead of lava.
- There has been some discussion about if this is likely, with someone referencing the DOT cones, traffic cones approved by DOT or the Department of transportation in the US.
- Also there have been mention of Dot-com coming close to Doot cone. The Dot-com bubble could be said to burst, just like this volcano bursts/erupts.
- Antlion: An antlion is the larva of an insect known as the lacewing, and is commonly called a doodlebug. These insects dig pits in the sand to use as traps; when a bug comes along and falls in, the sand collapses and falls on the bug, making it very difficult to escape. The antlion then eats the unsuspecting prey. The joke here is that an antlion trap is a cone dug into the earth, the inverse of a volcano cone rising out of the earth. It may also be a reference to Formica Leo, a small volcanic crater in the Reunion island named after the antlion.
- Inverse Volcano: as the name implies, a regular volcano but reversed. A real volcano consists of solid rock on the outside, magma on the inside and spewing lava from the top. This one is made of lava with rocks erupting out of it.
- Ghost Vent: cone with ghosts coming out of it.
- Pedant's Bane: the joke is that people sometimes confuse magma and lava, which are different names for the same heated liquid rock. Magma becomes lava when it emerges from a volcano. The Pedant's Bane volcano is therefore impossible by definition, but if it were possible, then a pedant would have met their bane (i.e. their downfall), because when they corrected someone's description of this volcano, the pedant would actually be wrong. Alternatively, the illustration itself could be Pedant's Bane because a pedant would be lured into pointing out how wrong it is. This is a direct reference to the pedant in 1405: Meteor.
The title text refers to a famous scene in Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi where Jabba the Hutt intends to feed Luke Skywalker to the sarlacc, an underground creature that builds a huge funnel trap similar to that of an antlion. Jabba's distinctive sail barge features prominently in that scene, and when Randall comes upon an antlion he can't help himself starting to build a scale model next to the antlion's inverted cone. Given how small antlions are, this will be very difficult to do, see for instance 878: Model Rail.
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