Amber formation

A piece of amber I take in my hand
from the seaweed on the Baltic strand.
It burns a longing in the skin of my hand -
tell me, stone, what message you bring to this land!
A vision from your singular shimmering light
spellbinds the sea waves' continuous flight.
Is your secret
sealed eternity?

Wera Engberg

The prehistoric conifers from which Baltic amber originates grew in a subtropical climate in what today is northern Europe.

During the ice ages, light Baltic amber was easily transportable during the formation of bed deposits . Much of the amber found today has been relocated several times.

Baltic amber formed some 45-50 million years ago of coniferous tree resin. In scientific works such trees are often referred to as Pinites Succinitera. During the Palaegone period, forests of these trees grew in the south-western valleys of the old Fenoskendinavian continent.

Great changes in the climatic conditions, possibly due to the sea transgression or the influence of the Gulf Stream, caused the ambient temperature to grow warmer and the amount of moisture to increase.

As a result of the higher air temperature, the Pinites Succinitera trees over secreted resin and thereby grew sickly. This created an opportunity for the forests to be supplanted by subtropical leaf-bearing trees, more suited to the now warmer climate.

The process of amber formation of resin includes several key stages stages: polymerization, oxidation, isomerization, fermentation and the so-called ripening process in alkaline soil of the Sambian peninsula.

The secreted resin quickly hardened due to the evaporation of volatile terpenes. Floods washed forest soils together with resin away to nearby streams and thence to the sea where it was deposited forming glauconitic sea sand sediments - now commonly referred to as "Blue Soil".

Over millions of years the resin affected by various physical, chemical and environmental factors underwent changes slowly turning into Baltic amber.

Later climatic changes more than once altered the map of land continent and the sea, and the amber was reworked many times by sea action forming various deposits of sediments in a wide geographical area.

The world's largest amber deposits today are found in the Sambia peninsula, now in Russia's Kaliningrad region where the strata containing amber (Blue Soil) is approximately 25-40 meters below ground level.

It was reported last year that Kaliningrad Amber Industrial Complex had started working at Primorskoe deposit. It had been planned that in August only Plyazhevoe deposit would be exploited. However, works at Plyazhnoe deposit were stopped on August 19 due to "serious technical damage". Again. The management of the complex decided to start working at Primorskoe deposit in order to shorten the period of work stoppage. Industrial extraction of the petrified resin from prehistoric coniferous trees, reliably preserved on the slightly salted Baltic Sea bed for some 50 to 90 million years, has continued for over a century.

Before World War II, when this former East Prussian territory belonged to Germany, the profit from amber extraction in the village of Palvininkiai, which is now known as Yantarniy (Russian for "of amber"), reached 1 million marks annually.

The Russian state–owned company, Amber Combine, currently exploits the same deposits. According to the deputy director of the company, Nikolay Petukhov, around 300 – 400 tons of amber is extracted from two quarries each year, the territory of which was once covered by the waters of the Baltic Sea.