The 5th Bolgia and Real Life Tar Pits

In the 5th ditch of the 8th circle of Inferno where those who committed the sin of graft are punished, there is a ditch of tar and pitch where the sinners swim around. This descriptive scene was interesting to me with its imagery, but it also reminded me of actual pits of tar that I have seen. A few weeks ago I visited Los Angeles, and while there I (after considerable convincing of my mom) went and visited the La Brea tar pits. For those of you who have never heard of them, the La Brea tar pits are a series of naturally occurring ditches of tar that seep up from the ground in the middle of Los Angeles. This geological phenomenon only occurs in a few places across the world, and the ones in Los Angeles are somewhat famous and have their own museum (they are also right next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for some reason). 

The tar pits themselves are basically small lakes and ponds that have tar below the surface water. On the surface, they sort of look like dirty lakes that smell like asphalt. Below, they are way more interesting, as they contain dozens of fossils each from prehistoric animals that got trapped in the tar. The largest pit has heartbreaking statues of a wooly mammoth family whose mother is dying in the tar (see picture below). The tar pits are a cool site, and I would highly recommend visiting them in Los Angeles.

As far as an actual comparison to Inferno, the tar pits are pretty different from the pitch that the grafters are punished in. The actual tar pits are just lakes with bottoms made of tar, which you can't really dive into like the grafters do. Still, I would not want to be trapped in either of them. I think it's kind of cool that there is a real world phenomenon that comes close to this punishment from Dante's poem. 

Pictures of the tar pits:

:(

Methane bubbles are released periodically from the tar pits (like farts, another similarity to the 5th bolgia)