hills named Palos Vcrdes. On the seaward side of this there 

 are cliffs several hundred feet high, in places droppinR straight 

 into the sea. in other places descending by sleep slopes Upon a 

 stretch of the latter a pleasant residential area was laid out only 

 a few years ago. with a beach club and many fine homes, sur- 

 rounded by ornamental trees and shrubbery. Today the entire 

 Mte is a grotesque shambles. 



The whole face of the cliff is slipping or creeping downward 

 to the sea at a pace that, although it cannot be observed by the 

 eye. is remarkable Roads are half fallen away: drainage pipes 

 stick out of the side of cliffs and then start again way below; 

 some houses are twisted or even completely upended; others 

 are cut in half or have been taken apart in great angular chunks 

 and the chunks then piled up crazily. The inhabitants have just 

 left everything as they installed it and gone elsewhere. Notable 

 is the fact that the vegetation seems not to be so adversely 

 affected as the works of man. A few trees or shrubs have been 

 overthrown and some now grow at sharp angles: otherwise they 

 seem to creep downward with the earth, so that some may be 

 seen growing merrily in the middle of colorfully furnished living 

 rooms or thrusting through garages. 



The same type of movement is going on over the greater part 

 of the earth, though much more slowly. Here it is merely a 

 slipping of uncompacted surface material; in other places it is 

 an inexorable creeping of solid rock strata. And. if you want to 

 appreciate how mudi solid rodcs can flow, obtain a geological 

 map of England and Wales in color, and you will clearly see that 

 strata which were once about Liverpool have now bulged south- 



ward between the mountains of Wales and the Pcnnlncs in Eng- 

 land almost to the Bristol Channel, some sixty miles away. An 

 even more impressive piece of evidence is a huge block of hard 

 sandstone, shaped like a shallow shoe box, that Is in the Geo- 

 logical Museum in London. This was balanced across a steel 

 beam about three feet from the floor in the year 1909 By 1930 

 its two ends had bent down to rest on that floor. Incidentally, 

 there is a kind of sandstone called Carolinite that, when cut into 

 thin slabs of about the size of a pocket notebook, can be bent 

 back and forth as though it were paper This is an odd phenom- 

 enon, and it is due to the loose arrangement of the molecules of 

 which the stone is composed. Then it must not be forgotten that 

 earth tides, causing an expansion and contraction of all surface 

 rocks, flow round and round the earth evei7 day just as ocean 

 tides do through the water. 



THE DEATH PITS 



Another product of crustal instability may be seen in the middle 

 of the modern city of Los Angeles — the famous La Brea Tar Pits 

 (the word hrea means "bitumen" in Spanish). These are great 

 funnels in the earth filled with bituminous pitch or asphalt that 

 keeps welling up from below. The material has a consistency 

 somewhere between firm taffy and frozen butter. It may be cut 

 or dug out with a sharp, strong instrument and the hole will 

 always fill up again. It is black and of smooth texture. Through- 

 out the soil in adjacent areas may be found small patches, lumps. 



In Ice Age times, the famous Tar Pits of Los Angeles, now in a city park, were traps of crude- 

 oil seepage in which hundreds of animals died. 





