Pluto's Basement: Accumulation in Hades Since the Miocene, circa 20 million Years Ago
Hellishly deep, the Los Angeles Basin holds the accumulated riches of all the ages since the late Cenozoic, during the Miocene, when the cool coastal waters evolved massive kelp forests along the sun-facing shores of the Santa Barbara Channel.
Filled with eroded gravels falling from the mountain ranges rimming its northern limit, it is also filled with the decayed biomass of marine and terrestrial creatures who, the ancestors of all present life, thrived and died over deep evolutionary time during the Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene and Anthropocene epochs of Earth.
The bottom of the Los Angeles Basin lies far below its current terrestrial surface. Below the teeming streets of Los Angeles is geologic well 9,100 meters, 5.6 miles deep.Note The deepest of these "basement" rocks are named for the god of the Underworld: called "plutonic," because they hardened from the molten mantle of the Earth's center. This is Pluto's Basement.For many millions of years, during the the Miocene and Pliocene epochs, Southern California was a basin of the Pacific Ocean: countless generations, countless individuals, of evolving marine beings lived, processed food, died, and sank to the bottom of Pluto's Basement, filling it, along with sediment and gravels washing continuously from the mountain slopes.
As the Pacific Ocean retreated, the Los Angeles basin became habitable land, but the western terminus of the Santa Monica Mountains became the Channel Islands, cut-off from the mainland, forming the Santa Monica Channel, a warm-termpreate ecological marine habitat of great abundance.
Terrestrial animals and forests lived and died over this deep well, across this deep time, leaving their bodies to decay and accumulate, atop those of the marine epochs. The fossilized remains of this immense biomass, crushed for aeons beneath the upper skin of planet Earth, became liquid petroleum. Lighter than than gravel rocks, the tar-liquid of petroleum oil percolated ever upward through kilometers of gravelly graves.
where the Pacific Plate meets the North American Plate. The Santa Monica, Northridge, and San Andreas Faults are the edges of those plates. Movements along these plates folded rock layers into "anticlines," which have trapped the uprising oil near the surface in vast inverted lakes, from which petroleum oil is pumped.
Space is also time. The depth of the Los Angeles Basin gives us its lifespan on a time scale of millions of years. On the very surface are living beings of every present instant, living their short lives. Nearest its surface, it holds the fertile soils and flowing waters, that supports large populations of plants, fungi, mammals, insectae, and biota of all clades. The recent deaths of those biota supply the fertility of its soils. Further down below, the Basin holds the dead ancestors of all those living things, stored in the dense form of energy-producing oil.
Source Bibliography for Pluto's Basement
