La Brea Tar Pits

We went to La Brea Tar Pits today. The tar pits are, well, they are pits full of tar. Except where the tar has been dug out and then they are pits full of water, with really, really disgusting oil floating on top of them, and bubbles of natural gas bubbling up every now and then. Around the park there’s tar bubbling up from the ground – mostly in fenced off bits, but there are some little spots on the grass.

What’s interesting about the tar pits is that for about 40,000 years they acted as a trap and a preserver of animals that fell in. There are some staggering statistics of what has (so far) been dug out – something like 1,000,000 bones. Including 1600 wolf skulls, bits of wood, woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and all sorts of birds and bits of wood.

There’s a museum with the skeletons and things in it, and some displays, which was OK, but not desperately exciting.

It also smells pretty bad.

It’s all set in a park and nice and pleasant, but if Shell or Exxon or some other evil corporation had dumped a load of crude oil (‘cos that’s what it is) in a park where people went, there would be a big fuss. But it’s natural, so it’s OK.

(That’s not to defend Shell or Exxon – they are, of course, evil corporations, but it’s interesting that people mostly don’t mind.)

Final fact for the day - La Brea means tar, in Spanish. So the La Brea tar pits are the tar tar pits. NewScientist had a word for this sort of thing a while ago, but I forget what it is.