Carpinteria, California gets its name from a unassuming sandy beach. This is the site of an extremely rare natural occurrence. A natural tar seep or tar pit. There are only 5 places in the world where this occurs, three of them are in California which includes the famous La Brea Tar Pits located about 70 miles east of Carpinteria in Los Angeles.
Over millions of years, organic matter such as plants and animals got buried underground. Heat and pressure then transformed it into oil. The oil was able to rise to the surface through fissures and evaporated on the way up. What's left behind is called tar and that's what you can see bubbling up if when you visit.
Now the native Chumash people used to use this tar to waterproof their boats. When the Spanish were exploring this area they witnessed the Chumash people building canoes and named this place the carpentry shop or "La Carpinteria".
One extra note: We found a number of articles that listed these tar pits as one of five natural asphalt lakes in the world. We did some additional research after we filmed and we unable to verify the exact number of occurrences. The true number of asphalt lakes and tar pits might occur a bit more often than we thought but it's still a very rare and cool natural occurrence that we're glad we were able to share with you.
