Pluto's Basement: The Growth of Hades Since the Miocene, circa 20 million Years Ago
Pluto's Basement
Nothing about Los Angeles is superficial, beginning with its geology. The Los Angeles Basin is so called because it drains the mountains which ring it, but the well of that basement is far below that surface. Very deep below the streets of Los Angeles is the "Basement of Pluto," a well 9,100 meters/5.6 miles deep.Note The deepest of these "basement" rocks are "plutonic," named for the god of the Underworld, because they hardened from the molten mantle of the Earth.Hellishly deep, this basin formation is filled with the gravels of aeons of erosion from the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains. The gravel debris washed down continuously on a vastly gradual time scale. Its depths hold the accumulated riches of all the ages.
For many millions of years, during the the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, this was a basin of the Pacific Ocean: vast tonnages of marine life died and sank to the bottom, filling it, along with sediment and gravels washing continuously from the mountain slopes. As the ocean retreated millions of years ago, the basin became habitable land. Land 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 that immense biomass became liquid petroleum, which, being less dense than gravel rocks, percolated ever upward through kilometers.
Vast tectonic forces rip along fault-lines through this same basin, 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.
The depth of the Los Angeles Basin is its most basic time scale. 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.
Hades, the Roman realm of the dead, has grown unceasingly beneath the flourishing, dangerous landscapes of Los Angeles, since long before humans arrived.
The riches of Hades are guarded by the spirits of dead. Exploiting the infinite riches of the Los Angeles Basin unleashes Hell for some living things, some portions of humanity.
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