4: Landscape (sketch)

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4: Landscape (sketch)

Title text: There's a river flowing through the ocean

Explanation

Many of the early xkcd comics were not normal webcomic strips, but instead postings from Randall's sketch book. This is one of those.

Transcript

[A sketch of a landscape with sun on the horizon]

Trivia


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Discussion

Interesting... when I first saw this sketch years ago, I assumed that the body of water was frozen and the "river" was a crack in the ice. -- mwburden 70.91.188.49 22:41, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

More likely the dark areas are the watery areas. That would explain the original comment: people asking "why the river?" were only making it too clear to Randall how he missed to convey what he meant. The confusion largely comes from the land being completely flat. 78.192.177.101 18:27, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Since he's changed the title text to say that the river is running through the ocean, you seem to be incorrect. Grahame (talk) 06:26, 18 October 2013 (UTC)Grahame

However, a river is made of fresh water and the sea is made of salt water. The Amazon river entering the ocean is an example.

Besides, some sea currents are called rivers. --Chvsanchez (talk) 23:54, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

I would like to point at that if you look to the left of the sunset(sunrise?) you can notice the dark branching lines that much resemble the rivers on a globe or map. --Para (talk) 20:32, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

There's an impossible figure since the rivers/cracks on the left-hand side imply that the light surface is solid, while the dark area on the right-hand side implies that the light surface is liquid (reinforced by sunset reflected on the water, and the ocean in the title). Nathan Hillery (talk) 15:09, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

.

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