AMBER

 

ORIGIN AND DEPOSITS OF THE BALTIC AMBER 

 

The main deposits of the Baltic amber are not in the former amber forests where resins had formed and got in the soil. At present it is supposed that amber forests had existed gore 15-20 million years in Fen Scandia and maybe in the middle and the north part of the Baltic Sea.

In the Eocene period amber forests were overflowed, by the tertiary period mowing from the West. The main part of amber was washed out from the soil of those forests and brought together into Eocene and Oligocene sediments - settlings of the south coast of the sea, from the Sambian peninsula to Chlopov near Dancing (Gdansk). In these deposits the so-called “blue soil” (clayey sand with glaucomatous admixtures) was so much filled with amber that it that been mind here for more than 100 years. These are famous amber mines near Palmnicken (today Yantarny) in Russia. The thickness of the stratum of the blue soil is about 7-8 meters, and there are approximately 2,5 kg of amber in one cubic meter. Primary deposits were totally and secondary partly destroyed. At present the Baltic amber can be found from England in the West to Ukraine in the East, south Sweden and south Finland in the North.