Coming Into Los Angeles

3 November 2018

Days 15 to 17 - We decided to spend a few days in Los Angeles.  Not that we love the city so much.  Nor did we care if we saw all the sights, or saw any celebrities.

Mostly, we have people we want to see here.  Family and friends.  People we haven't seen in a while.

And we just needed a rest.  We spent our first two weeks driving with frequent stops.  Up each morning, repack, reload the car, eat, head out.  Drive for several hours, have lunch, drive a while more, find a hotel, unload the car, sleep.  And the next day, do it all over again.

So it was truly wonderful to sleep late, relax, and leave things unpacked for a few days.

Because we didn't know exactly when we'd be arriving, we couldn't really make plans ahead of time.  And people live their lives.  We ended up not being able to meet up with some of our friends - but we hope to do so once we're settled in Tucson.

We did, however, manage to hang out with our niece and significant other.  A couple of dinners, and today a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits. 

The Tar Pits are places where tar has seeped to the earth's surface and created huge deep lakes of tar.  Over the eons, various animals have fallen into these pits, became stuck, died, and created fossil pits extinct creatures.

There's even a group of mastodon statues set up to show one animal stuck in the tar, while the rest of the family group freaks out!!!

It's a little bit creepy, and pretty morbid, but it also is an amazing place! 
 

The tar is still seeping to the surface, and methane bubbles up under the thick black tar, creating shiny black bubbles.  They don't burst, really, because the tar is so thick and viscous.  It's more like the bubbles develop a tiny thin spot and then deflate.

It probably is easiest to quote from the various information placards that are around the various pits and displays:

"La Brea's unique tar seeps make each pit here a different Ice Age time capsule.  This is because the tar oozes up in different places at different times.  While one seep stops, another one starts up not far away.  The types of plants and animals that get stuck in one seep are often different from those that get stuck in a seep that pops up later.  This start-and-stop cycle has occurred many times here over the past 55,000 years.

"No two pits are alike.  Each pit at La Brea is a unique time capsule from L.A.'s Ice Age past.  These pits give us clues to how this area changed.



"Fossils form side-by-side, yet they are from eras twenty to fifty thousand years apart.

"The oil field that underlies La Brea is about 1,000 feet deep.  Pressure forces some of the thick oil - asphalt - upward.

"As deep underground layers shift, cracks form in the overlying rock layers.  Asphalt and methane gas ooze and bubble up through these vents.

"The asphalt can ooze all the way to the surface to form shallow pools that actively trap animals and plant pieces.  Animals decompose and only their bones remain.

"Over many thousands of years, sand and soil wash down from the mountains.  This seals off the seeps and protects the fossils trapped inside.

"Methane gas continues to bubble up, churning the bones from different animals and time periods into complex jumbles.

"This peaceful park was perilous for animals who walked here 20,000 years ago.  La Brea's tar made this unsafe ground for both predator and prey.  Six foot tall 2000 lb sloths got stuck here and died.  So did bison, horses, and camels.  As these creatures lay dying, hungry dire wolves and other predators tried to live off their remains.  Many of them died in the process.

"You are standing a thousand feet above a large underground oil field.  This oil seeps to the surface as sticky asphalt.  Plants and unwary animals have been getting trapped in this treacherous goo for tens of thousands of years.  Being stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits was a terrible way to die - but a great way to preserve fossils!

"Finding fossils in asphalt takes hard work, and we have to dig below the surface to locate them.  This is one of more than a hundred pits that we dug looking for fossils in this park.  Inside you can see how fossils of an extinct mastodon, Harlan's ground sloth, and saber-toothed cat look when they are first discovered by scientists.

"Our team patiently uncovers fossils.  We measure fossils in place once we find them and then use hand tools to remove them from the Tar Pits.

"We prepare fossils for research and storage.  We work in the lab to remove matrix, repair damage, and solve fossil puzzles.

"We care for the fossils we find.  Inside the Museum, we make sure each fossil - and the information that goes with it - is maintained.

"It takes about a month to remove all of the fossils from a three-foot-square chunk of matrix.  We've identified up to 1,000 fossils from a single chunk!
 

"Tiny fossils of plants, insects, and other small animals give us information that we can't get from large fossils.  These microfossils tell us about L.A.'s climate and habitat and how they've changed over the past 50,000 years.  They can also help us understand changes that are happening now - and may happen in the future.

"The oldest fossils date back 55,000 years.  The most recent fossils are 14,000 years old.

"We've dug 15 feet deep.  We might find fossils up to five feet deeper.

"We've even found the fossils of flies that fed on dead animals trapped in the Tar Pits.

 

"Big bones raise big questions.  The Tar Pits trapped large animals that lived in the L.A. basin from 55,000 to 11,000 years ago.  Many of these species are now extinct.  Each fossil we find provides clues about life in L.A. in the prehistoric past.  But one of the biggest mysteries still remains: Why did so many of the largest animals we find here die out?"

As I said, creepy, morbid, and fascinating!  And of course, Dad's hat was jumping up and down in excitement!

But now it's Saturday night, and we've said our goodbyes.  We'll leave tomorrow to start our drive across the Mojave Desert, and then the Sonoran Desert.  It sounds romantic in theory, but also hot, dry, and maybe a little treacherous.

That's all part of the adventure!