On 6 June 2019, Dr Lori Bettison-Varga, president and director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC), announced the beginning of a long-term initiative to reimagine and renovate one of the institution’s most prized components: its 12-acre campus in Hancock Park, which is home to the world-renowned La Brea Tar Pits and the George C. Page Museum.
The Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County’s proposed redesign of La Brea Tar Pits will not only support scientific discovery but also demystify the science and make it relevant and inspiring for generations to come. A cornerstone of their plan is the preservation and enhancement of public green space at the site. The goal is to ensure it remains accessible to everyone.
Blooloop caught up with Dr Bettison-Varga and Dr Emily Lindsey, assistant curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, to learn about the expansion project and the scientific significance of the unique site where the remains of a cross-section of the Ice Age ecosystem has been preserved.
Talking about science in the public sphere
Dr Bettison-Varga has been president and director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) since 2015. A geologist, she received her PhD from the University of California, Davis.
“When this position came up, it was very intriguing,” she says. “It appealed to my desire as a geologist to be able to talk about science today in a public sphere, helping to encourage engagement of communities with science. Also, I had grown up with La Brea Tar Pits and with the Natural History Museum. I’m from Long Beach, California. I remember my mom taking us to the Tar Pits right after the museum opened.”
It is also an internationally revered location:
“Being able to take the work that I had done in higher ed into the museum world was a real opportunity to impact the public. Having worked in the educational system as a geologist was a way to really open my mind to these concepts we’re confronting today in the museum world.
Speaking of the Tar Pits expansion project, she comments:
“There is a lot of responsibility involved in this project. It is a fascinating science. I think we need more people to really appreciate it, and understand what it tells us.”
Reimagining La Brea Tar Pits
A competition helped to select the architects for the project. NHMLAC chose WEISS/MANFREDI’s team, headed by co-founders Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi. The firm was chosen through an international search process.
The Museums chose three finalists based on the overall quality and character of their response to a Request for Information, their conceptual approach to the project, and their previous experience and team strength, along with interviews and references.
NHMLAC assembled a jury of leading figures from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, design, science, natural history, and the arts.
“We were very clear in the competition that we were looking for teams that could approach this not just as a museum, but as a museum research space; a civic location, and that the integration of the landscape itself with the storytelling of the museum was really critical.”
In December 2019, Dr Bettison-Varga announced the selection of New York-based multidisciplinary design practice WEISS/MANFREDI. The firm is known for the dynamic integration of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape design. It was chosen to lead a master planning team in re-imagining the uniquely important La Brea Tar Pits.
Choosing a design
NHMLAC had its own internal judge and a jury that gave feedback. Then, the organisation put it out to the public.
“We really wanted to know how folks responded. So, we had the models on-site at La Brea Tar Pits, and we were open to the public from three to five for free, Monday through Friday, so folks could come in and see them. We did a lot of work with stakeholders. Then we had an online survey that gave folks the chance to tell us what they liked about the three different potential plans. We got a lot of feedback – 2,500 comments in total from across LA County.”
In terms of the WEISS/MANFREDI concept, she says:
“What we really loved was the way that the project brought together the lenses of this pop culture piece that you have in the front, the civic space, and the research; and how that external piece really lent vibrancy to the overall park, as well as opening up the museum to the park’s face in a way that it currently is not.”
WEISS/MANFREDI’s concept, ‘The La Brea Loops and Lenses ’is in the form of a triple mobius. It links the existing elements to redefine Hancock Park as a continuously unfolding experience, from palaeontology to playgrounds, in a continuum from prehistoric time to our contemporary moment.
“We felt that it worked well with the campus, as a whole. It reached broadly to folks. That culture piece was really important to the community.”
La Brea Tar Pits & Lord Cultural Resources
With the transformation planning underway, the Museum engaged Lord Cultural Resources, the world’s largest cultural professional practice, to develop a financial model and business plan for its operations that would flexibly accommodate the project as it evolves.
“Our team developed a two-phased process that includes thorough research and analysis of the envisioned operation leading to a sustainable Business Plan,” says Andrea Kezdi, director of marketing and business development at Lord Cultural Resources. “The plan is backed up by clear assumptions and integrated with a financial model that the Museum can then own and further update to reflect future operating conditions and project developments.”
A key role for the community
Balancing the functions of the La Brea Tar Pits site – it is a visitor attraction, a scientific research facility, and a public community park – can be a huge task, Dr Bettison-Varga explains. Her response is to involve the community and the public in the process:
“As we’re going through the process, our approach has been transparency, community engagement, and hearing people’s concerns. This started long before the actual competition. We were out in the community getting a sense of how people felt about this space, what was important to them to keep, and what resonated with them.”
“When I took the job as director, people said, ‘If you’re going to work on the Tars, don’t touch the Hills, because kids love to roll down them.’ Then there is the fact that folks like to have their kids go to soccer camp there: it’s a field site at a soccer camp.”
Effectively, she adds:
“We are leaning into the role the park plays for the community. Meanwhile, we are also being incredibly respectful of the critical scientific work that’s being done there, and shining a light on that work. It is a challenge.”
Engaging visitors with science
Part of this involves drawing people into that scientific process, engaging them with it, and making it relevant to them.
“They are connected to it by location,” Bettison-Varga points out. “They are right there at the site where the fossils are extracted. So, they can see the whole process of discovery and can link it to what’s happening today.”
Dr Bettison-VargaWe are trusted sources of information, and we are advocates for science. We want to draw people in and help them explore the science on their own terms.
“It is the place where we can introduce folks who are not sure about the science of climate change to what we know, how we know it, and how the past helps us understand the present day, and enables us to think about the future.”
That, she says, is the beauty of museums:
“We are trusted sources of information, and we are advocates for science. We want to draw people in and help them explore the science on their own terms, in ways that help them see how relevant it is to them, and how approachable it can be to them to understand what we know, and how we know it.”
La Brea Tar Pits explores the reality of climate change
A certain amount of denial in the face of climate change still persists:
“30 years ago, I was teaching oceanography at the College of Wooster (in Wooster, OH). I was teaching climate change. We called it global warming back then. It was fairly new. Yet I felt that if there was even a chance that these predictions were right, we had to start understanding and making changes.”
Any other course of action, she felt, would mean taking unconscionable risks with the planet:
“I think it’s increasingly difficult for folks to not see the reality of what’s happening today, and connect it to humans’ intervention as a planet.”
On the other hand:
“I think this is the challenge we have in natural history museums: we talk about time. We talk about Earth’s history. It’s deep time – and the Tar Pits is not deep time. it’s 50,000 years. But we need to place the rate of change in context. Otherwise, it’s easy for folks to hang onto this notion that ‘Well, the climate’s always changed, so of course, it’s changing today.’
“The La Brea Tar Pits is a place to say: ‘Yes, it has always changed, but let’s talk about the rate of change. And let’s talk about what happens when that coincides with humans’ use of fossil fuels. And let’s do it in a place that is ironic because this is where fossil fuels were extracted.”
Collaborating with the community
Museums occupy a unique position as an authority since they have no obvious agenda. She qualifies this:
“Museums, of course, are being opened up to a lot of challenges today about who is the authority, and the provenance of artefacts. That comes into the La Brea Tar Pits because it is Tongva land.”
The Tongva Tribe has been indigenous to the Los Angeles Basin for 7,000 years. They used the asphalt as a glue to waterproof baskets and canoes:
“Through our environmental impact review process, we have two tribal representatives who are overseeing the environmental impact review. We have established close collaborations with tribal communities in Southern California, earning back their trust as part of that process. There are so many threads feeding into this.”
Inspiring wonder at La Brea Tar Pits
It is the function of a museum like this, she feels, to be a place where people feel a sense of belonging.
“I think it is critical that museums shift to the third space, where this is our community space, as much as it is the space of the scientists or the educators who work there. It is also really important, in Los Angeles that our museums are connecting with a diverse audience, and fostering a new face of science. The future of science has to reach out broadly and be representative. We have the perfect location to do that in Los Angeles, with such a diverse population.”
The core function of the museum remains:
“Obviously, we are places that should continue to inspire wonder and an appreciation of the biodiversity of this planet; natural history museums have that ability and responsibility. People understand the value of the collecting that we do as a way of recording what’s happening on the planet, and how we are advocates for life on the planet.”
NHM Commons
Museums have come a long way since they were shrines to the past. Now, they are living spaces:
“We have this new project called the NHM Commons,” she explains.
The NHM Commons project is a transformative expansion of the Natural History Museum, expected to open in Fall 2023. A dynamic community hub and new “front porch” to NHM and Exposition Park, NHM Commons will unite people with nature, culture, and each other through vibrant and accessible indoor-outdoor gathering spaces.
Creating new opportunities for the public to experience aspects of the Museum without a ticket, the project will encompass 75,000 square feet of renovated space, new construction, and landscaping on the southwest side of its Exposition Park home, including a light-filled welcome centre, an inviting lobby with retail space, a new multipurpose theatre, a café, and a large community plaza—all promising to be a new destination for science, culture, and connecting with our community.
“It is meant to be a place for belonging: for our own programmes, for co-curated programmes, for community launch programmes. It’s about creating this openness to the park and building on some incredible community partnerships we’ve developed over the last five years.
“We want to take that same model at the La Brea Tar Pits, while also recognizing that the Tars is a uniquely international destination in that region because people around the world grew up learning about it.”
Making the site globally accessible
Using the digital space to make the site globally accessible is on the agenda:
“That is definitely part of our plans,” Dr Bettison-Varga says. “It’s a whole other opportunity for us. We know, after all, after two-plus years of COVID, that we can actually do that. Certainly, at the reimagined La BreaTar Pits, connecting through our theatre auditorium spaces and technology digitally is going to be much easier to do than it is now.”
She adds:
“I think also that there’s a little bit of fatigue around digital. So, considering how to do it in a way that people feel they really want to access it is going to be key. We’ll see how the trends change.”
Dr Bettison-Varga’s continuing vision for the Natural History Museum goes back to that notion of being a place where people feel they belong:
“Obviously, inclusivity is part of it,” she concedes. “But it’s more than just being included, it’s belonging, having a voice, and participating.”
Community science at La Brea Tar Pits
She uses the work the museum is doing to illustrate this:
“The work the Urban Nature Research Centre and the community science project that we have linked to that is all about getting out in LA and engaging with folks in their parks, in their schoolyards, in their backyards, and, and having the folks in Los Angeles feel like they’re contributing to this overall understanding of urban nature.”
Dr Bettison-VargaOver the last five or six years, we have really expanded dramatically in our public outreach. Not just in the physical locations of the museums, but in developing a broader reach. This is really important because there are folks who can’t get to the museum. Bringing the museum to them and meeting their needs is vital
“That is very powerful. People usually call it Citizen Science, but we call it Community Science. We feel like that’s a better representation, given the political sensitivity around the term citizen. That community science work is really important.”
“There is also our mobile museum programme, getting out to schools, and to community events, festivals, and parks; and our community partnerships.
“Over the last five or six years, we have really expanded dramatically in our public outreach. Not just in the physical locations of the museums, but in developing a broader reach. This is really important because there are folks who can’t get to the museum. Bringing the museum to them and meeting their needs is vital. Again, that was based on listening.”
Beyond school visits
In short, she explains:
“We have an internship programme that is going to be expanding, working with high school students, post-bacc students, but also with community college students to help foster their continuation in college.”
The NHM Collections Study Awards were instituted to provide funding for undergraduate and graduate students to visit and study the collections of the Natural History Museums of L.A. County:
“And, of course, we have Adventures in Nature Camps,” she adds. “We want to be this resource, this partner, as well as a place where kids have the opportunity to do science with us. Of all the things that we do, we should be this. We should go beyond just having school visits.”
The significance of La Brea Tar Pits
Dr Emily Lindsey is assistant curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, and adjunct faculty in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research uses information from past and modern ecosystems to understand how Ice Age animals and environments functioned, how climate change and human actions intersect to drive extinctions and to predict future ecological responses in the face of modern global change.
She also collaborates cross-disciplinarily to develop strategies for integrating deep- and near-time perspectives on global change into land management practices, environmental law and policy frameworks, and conservation science.
Explaining the site’s significance, she tells blooloop:
“The La Brea Tar Pits is a site that captures the Ice Age.”
This, she points out, is a relatively recent period:
“There are no dinosaurs. It’s not millions of years old. The oldest fossils we have are less than 60,000 years old.”
Exploring the Ice Age
When people think of the Ice Age, certainly in the UK, they tend to picture woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos. However:
“We don’t have so many woolly things here; it’s Los Angeles, and it’s sunny. We have Colombian mammoths. They are not the not-furry kind and look a lot like elephants. We have mastodons, we have camels, horses, and bison. Also, we have giant ground sloths, we have sabre-tooth cats, we have dire wolves, we have American lions, other big cats, and giant bears.”
“There are also a lot of big birds that went extinct at the end of the Ice Age,” she adds. “That’s something people don’t know that much about, but there were big birds like Teratorns, and different species of storks and eagles and so on that went extinct at the same time that the mammals did.
“These are things that the La Brea Tar Pits site captures.”
Keeping a record
In addition:
“What is unique about the La Brea Tar Pits site is that we are one of the only sites on earth that preserves both plants and bones together. So, we also have things like oak leaves and juniper berries and acorn cups and cypress cones.”
This means there is a record of the vegetation that existed alongside the animals:
“This is important for understanding the interplay between different components of the ecosystem. On top of that, we have small animals, songbirds, lizards, snakes, and rodents. We even have insects, which is rare; we get beetle wings and legs, and we’ve recently been finding articulated complete curled-up millipedes. It’s one of the only fossil sites in the world where you get something approximating an entire ecosystem.”
It is unusual for several reasons:
“One is that the types of sediments are very different. Plant material such as leaves will be preserved better in more acidic soils, but acid dissolves bones, so those tend not to be preserved together.
“The ways that large fossils and small fossils get preserved, tend to be different, also. You will often find the bones of large animals in bone beds, where a flood has washed a lot of larger carcasses together. Then they have broken up, and the lighter, smaller things have washed away. You might find records of plant material or small bones in raptor middens or caves, but you wouldn’t get the giant sloth or mammoth bones. It’s a unique site in that way.”
Preservation
There are, she explains, two elements that make the La Brea Tar Pits conditions universally suitable for preservation:
“Firstly, the asphalt seeps are actively sticking things in place; they’re actively accumulating material, rather than it being a case of, ‘A stream washed this here’, or ‘A bird brought this here.’
“These shallow pools, maybe six inches deep, are created on the landscape, with asphalt-saturated sediments below. It’s not like the quicksand you see in the movies, but it’s very sticky; those few inches of asphalt are enough to trap something as big as a mammoth if it gets three of its feet stuck in there.”
During the ice age, the prevailing conditions in the area would probably, she says, have been wetter:
“Often a thin layer of water would cover a lot of these seeps. When it rains, we still see this: it just looks like we have these little ponds in our park; this thin layer of water that can’t seep into the ground because the asphalt is creating an impermeable layer, and preventing it.
“It would have looked perfectly innocuous. A bison or a giant ground sloth would walk in to take a drink, and then get stuck. Then a pack of dire wolves or a pack of sabre tooth cats would come by and see this stuck animal in the pond, and think, ‘Oh, yay. Easy lunch,’ and attack it, and they would all be preserved.”
Unusual finds at La Brea Tar Pits
Then there is the site’s second interesting characteristic:
“Something that is very unusual is that we find way more carnivores than herbivores. That is not normal in an ecosystem.”
She compares this with the ecosystem of the African Savanna:
“The African Savanna is the last remaining normal Cenozoic ecosystem. You’ve got hippos, rhinos, elephants, wildebeest and impalas and zebras, then a few lions and cheetahs – it’s very much that food pyramid. At the Tar Pits, it’s reversed for the big animals. There will be 5,000 dire wolves, 3000 sabre-toothed cats, and fewer than 40 mammoths.”
“Firstly, then, the asphalt is actively trapping things. Both the big things like mastodons and dire wolves, and also the birds that land there, the insects that land or blow into it, and the leaf material that blows in and gets stuck, like fly paper.
“The second thing is that something about the nature of the asphalt prevents the decay of most of these tissues. Plant cellulose is preserved, bone collagen is preserved, and insect chitin is preserved. The shells of little fresh water clams and snails are preserved. We don’t get keratin, so there are no feathers or fur, interestingly.
“There is something about the properties of the asphalt that prevents water from going through. That probably prevents a lot of microbial action that would normally decompose this material. So, it stays preserved for tens of thousands of years.”
Helping to understand climate change
Commenting on the research opportunities this affords, she explains:
“One of the real advantages of the La Brea Tar Pits, in addition to the fact they offer the whole ecosystem, is that the time period that it covers is so recent. It is the most important time period for understanding the environmental crises and long-term changes that we’re going through today.
“The last 60,000 years start before the peak of the last Ice Age. Glaciers are expanding. We eventually get to a point, around 25,000 years ago, where half of North America is covered under an ice sheet – and then it starts to recede. That is the last major episode of global climate change and climate warming that happened, from about 18,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago.”
“The La Brea Tar Pits capture that period. We can see how different plants and animals responded to these warming processes in the past. This allows us to help predict which species might be most vulnerable or most resilient to climate changes going forward. In terms of the ones that are going to want to move, what types of climatic indicators might they be tracking? Are they more dependent on precipitation, or are they more dependent on temperature? Are they dependent on other species, or certain attributes of the soils – what is it?”
Human impact
She adds:
“Another thing that was happening at this time was that humans first arrived in North America, and started impacting ecosystems. We don’t have direct evidence of very early humans. All of the human records we have found post-date the time when the big mammals went extinct.”
However:
“Because the preservation is so good, we are able to get precise radiocarbon dates off just about everything in our records. So, we can look at when this species disappeared, or that species disappeared, or – did this species disappear? What was going on at the time? In terms of the climate, of local vegetation records, of like other species of the La Brea Tar Pits, we can start to piece that together.”
Tracking a timeline at La Brea Tar Pits
An accurate timeline begins to emerge:
“A lot of this is research that is just coming out,” she comments. “We have a grad student who has been tracking the plants and figuring out when different species disappeared from the region. They are investigating which climatic factors might have been involved in that.
“We’ve only just started really looking at small things like insects and rodents. A lot of this has only been happening over the last 10 years or so. It’s a site that people have been intensely studying for more than a century. But until recently, they thought the only interesting thing about it was the dire wolves.”
The fact that, during the period concerned, two-thirds of the large animals in North America – and, in fact, around the world – disappeared, is something Dr Lindsey and her team are exploring:
“It’s the biggest extinction event of the entire Cenozoic Era; the biggest extinction event since the dinosaurs went extinct. It is a really fundamental change in global ecosystems. For the last 50-plus million years, most of the world, all ice-free continents, looked like the African Savanna. That was the normal ecosystem for the Cenozoic. We think of it as unique today. But it’s unique because it’s the only one that didn’t suffer this incredible change.”
Changing ecosystems
There were large animals all over the world:
“In Australia, there were giant wombats, the size of cows. There were giant lemurs in Madagascar, dwarf hippopotamuses in the Mediterranean, giant ground sloths and giant armadillos in the Americas, and rhinos and lions in Europe. There were large animals everywhere, but not anymore.”
This, then, was a huge fundamental change in global ecosystems. She says:
“People are now recognising it as the initial pulse of the extinction crisis that we’re in today.”
We frequently hear discussions about whether we are currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction:
“There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the Earth so far,” she says. Mass extinction is when we lose 75% of species or more. There is a lot of talk about whether we are on that trajectory. We are experiencing extinctions really fast, and things are not getting better; they’re getting worse. If we are, then the first pulse of it is that loss of megafauna, sometime over 10,000 years ago.
“Understanding both why that happened, and which impacts of that are important for mitigating and adapting to the changes that are happening today, is crucial.”
Impactful research at La Brea Tar Pits
She gives some examples of the practical applications of that knowledge:
“We currently have a partnership with some local entities in the LA area. These are The Nature Conservancy, a big international conservation organisation, and also LA City and County government. We are guiding restoration plans locally in LA. For instance, we are helping inform which will be the best plants to grow, given predicted climate scenarios, based on what has made it through these last major climatic upheavals.”
Additionally, she says:
“In the bigger picture, if we can figure out exactly what was going on when these animals disappeared, it shines a lot of light on what’s happening today.
“We have a pretty good idea of that now, though, unfortunately, I can’t talk about it just yet. But there are actions that conservation organisations can take. Also, just from a communication standpoint, in terms of getting people to understand the urgency of addressing what’s happening today, this is a key opportunity, from the research at the museum and the public platform that the museum has, to talk to the world about what happens when we have a lot of people on a dramatically warming landscape, and what that means for ecosystems.”
The reimagined La Brea Tar Pits is scheduled to open in 2028.
Top image: WEISS/MANFREDI design featuring a bridge across the Lake Pit at La Brea Tar Pits. Rendering courtesy of WEISS/MANFREDI.
