In addition to movie stars, frozen yogurt and earthquakes, Los Angeles is also famous for its car culture. Traffic jams are legendary, rush hour happens 24 hours a day, and if you spend even an hour caught in gridlock, you’ll understand why the phrase “road rage” originated in Los Angeles.



So what if all the cars disappeared? Sure, Los Angeles wouldn’t be so smoggy and you’d get out of paying auto insurance, but that would be hella creepy. How creepy? See for yourself:

Running on Empty

Wondering how Ross Ching did this? Head over to his website for a detailed explanation.

But not all apocalyptic time lapse videos need to be photoshopped...

Mother nature throws some pretty wicked things at the world all by herself.

This dust storm hit Phoenix on July 5, 2011. It only took two hours to blanket the entire city, reducing visibility to zero. While dust storms are common in the Sonoran Desert, storms of this size are not. The cloud reached a maximum height of 1.8 km, a width of 160 km and moved at an incredible speed of 64 km per hour. Scientists think that the region’s prolonged drought was the main reason for the storm’s severity.

California Wildfires

The 2009 Los Angeles wildfires, a series of 63 wildfires, destroyed more than 336,020 acres (1360 sq km) of land between July and November. The Station Fire, captured in this video, was the deadliest, burning up 160,000 acres (650 sq km) and killing 2 firefighters.

Space Station

A time-lapse taken from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night. James Drake created this video by downloading and compiling hundreds of still shots.

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