I have never fallen into Movedizas Arenas, but like most people, I have been anxious for that at least several times in my life. You too, right? It is real: you can be absorbed in the soft liquefied land unexpectedly, in walks or random walks. One of my friends fell to the Movedizas sands in Utah, and is always prepared, so I knew exactly what to do: move my legs slowly and deliberately, in small well -controlled steps. Lie down to extend your weight. Although it is contradictory, steal more to the ground that consumes it. Do not waste your energy fighting powerfully to leave, because it will only worsen it. Relax your mind and body, and you will be released. The point is that the exit is not what your instincts could be shouting towards you.
Once upon a time, many animals fell into a similar trap and fought. Millions and millions of them perished in a mud field, and now we are going to visit their skulls and rib cages mounted on sockets in the middle of Los Angeles.
The wells and the museum of the Brea Tar are not a place of sand sand, but of something more scary: Aphalt spraying, bubbling a fissure on our planet, the same that gives us earthquakes in southern California. The asphalt is made of the remains of algae and past animals, and will never get tired of swallowing life.
The most interesting thing I learned from the museum La Brea Tar Pits came from my friend (and friend of Lwon) Katharine Gammon. There are barely fossils of night animals in the collection. This left me breathless.
In the absence of the sun, the asphalt that is filtered through the Earth’s crust would cool slightly and solidify, so nightclubs were not so often trapped in sticky tar. When the sun reappeared to heat the world, the asphalt grew again, and twilight and daytime mammals became the main victims. The danger could have been more visible at the end of the afternoon. But during the twilight time of the morning, the leaf sand could have covered softer parts of the tar wells and keep them isolated and warmer. When many large herbivorous mammals were out of time at dawn time, they walked on the soft parts and were trapped.
You would be surprised by the great volume of megafauna of the Pleistocene that scientists have exhumed from the break. Mastodons; camels; saber teeth cats; Scimitar teeth cats; American lions that resemble muffasa and not to the panthers who roam here now; Terrible, real wolves; Family faces such as Berghorn, Mula and Alce deer; And I lost the notion of how many others. I looked for rodents of unusual size, but I only saw some of the usual size.
The museum even has a sadly realistic picture of a mastodon trapped in tar, sinking and calling his family to the edge of a pond. Such great beasts, ready for the shot, would obviously have tempted predators and scavengers, but cats and wolves hope to delight with the other trapped creatures were also trapped. The museum has several specimens of Smilodon fatalisThe really impressive saber toothpayer. Millions of fossils have been selfless from the break. But they include only a few mapaches and other inhabitants of the night.
To survive the toxic swamp of the break, the big daytime animals would have been better walking at night. The sun is what exposed them, while the cold darkness of the night could have helped them not only to hide, but to silently survive the quagmire. It is better that they have been adapting a new strategy to survive. The point is that the path to security may not have been what their instincts told them.
I do not say that we should not fight at all. We want to fight to survive, and it is difficult to turn off that instinct. I am saying that we must think of other ways of fighting, which could be contradictory but more effective. Getting safe can be a bit different from what we expect. The swamp will not stop trying to destroy us, so we have to be creative. We have to be agile and loose, quickly standing, maybe a little cunning, maybe a little closer to the darkness of what we are used to. There are ways to get out of each quagmire.
Higher image: By the author
Intermediate image: Wikimedia Commons
#Sinking #feelings
