- Who
- Pitch Lake
- What
- 457,294.8 square metre(s)
- Where
- Trinidad and Tobago (La Brea)
- When
- 1595
Nature was producing asphalt (bitumen) long before humans decided to pave their roads with it, and the largest of these sticky lakes is at La Brea (Spanish for "pitch"), Trinidad. Pitch Lake, the world's largest asphalt lake, is approximately 113 acres (457,294.8 m²; 4,922,280 ft²) in size and believed to be 250 ft (76.2 m) in depth in the center, holding around 10 million tons of bitumen.
Tar lakes form in various places around the world and are produced by oil seeping up through porous rock and lighter fraction (gas, petroleum, etc) evaporate to leave the thick and sticky bitumen tar.
Pitch Lake is solid enough that it is possible to walk on, but don't stand there too long as tar pits hold some of the world's best preserved ancient plant and animal life from up to thousands of years ago.
Pitch from the lake was used by indigenous inhabitants for millennia before Sir Walter Raleigh, describing it as "... most excellent good, and melteth not with the sunne as the pitch of Norway...", used it to caulk his ships and introduced it to Europe.
