Title text:
With their 13 years recording and performing together and two humans worth of mass, the White Stripes are sandwiched neatly between gray wolves and blue whales.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3283/
Lifespan is in seconds, not years. Greenland is old.
For all complex life and most of simple life, Greenland was there. It was in different places and depths, but those rocks were there for most of the time. There’s only a few other places on the planet that rival Greenland’s age (or more specifically, certain rock formations in Greenland, though they make up a significant portion of it).
Though one thing about “lifespan” is that it’s intended to be “age at death”, not “current age”, so I’d call that an inaccuracy, as Greenland will probably continue to exist for billions more years (though when the glacial lakes eventually form and break free, there will be a lot of sudden erosion).
Makes me curious what the future lifespan will be for the various continents. I wish our own lifespans were more geologically significant. Though at least I got to see the time since dinosaurs tick from 65 million years ago to 66 million years ago.
Play tectonics is pretty well studied, plus you got the whole part where the sun becomes a red giant and annihilates the planet. I bet Randall worked it out pretty well.
Back of the envelope it’s about 10^17 seconds, which works out a few billion years. He drew it with some wiggle area, so anywhere from hundreds of millions to several billions which covers the range of plate tectonics and the Earth being consumed by the sun.
So it seems pretty accurate
Oh right, it’s logarithmic, so that wiggle area is much bigger than it would be on a similar linear graph. I also forgot about the sun swallowing the earth, which would prevent Greenland from getting into another order of magnitude, though there is always the possibility that earth will get flung either to a higher orbit or out of the solar system entirely before the sun swallows it and Greenland will last for trillions of years.