"The most remarkable stone of antiquity … was amber, which passes through all ages and peoples up to the present day as a bright gem." (Academician A. E. Fersman)
For many thousands of years, the waves of the Baltic Sea have been undermining a high cliff off the northern and western shores of the Kaliningrad Peninsula. The waves in their destructive work are helped by frost, rain and wind, little by little the sea comes to the shore.
In autumn and spring, when strong northerly and westerly winds raise especially high waves, the excitement reaches the bottom and erodes the amber-bearing layer of the "blue earth", which lies under water at a depth of 5-6 meters.
From there, from the depths, the waves pull out pieces of amber and throw them ashore, and the locals collect them.
This method of amber mining has been carried out since the most distant antiquity. During storms, people went to the high steep coast and watched where the sea would throw blocks of sandy bluish-green amber-bearing rock.
The amber collectors went knee-deep, waist-deep into the water, fished out pieces of rock with special nets and threw them ashore, and there women and children chose amber from the sand, which they called “the blessing of the sea”.
There were real "amber storms" in the Baltic. In 1862, during one such storm, the sea washed ashore near the village of Yantarny 125 poods of amber, two tons! Another storm, which raged all night from 22 to 23 December 1878, caused severe destruction in the village. But when the next morning the residents went ashore, they saw that it was all strewn with amber. By evening, the sea threw out many more pieces of amber.
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In 1914, near Svetlogorsk, waves carried 870 kilograms of amber to the beach during the day. In these places, at the bottom of the sea, there seems to be a huge amber-bearing placer.
Amber figurines found in prehistoric burials in the Baltic region.
The sea throws out amber not only during severe storms. Experts estimate that the beaches of the Kaliningrad Peninsula receive an average of 36 to 38 tons of amber per year. For a very long time, underground amber mining has also been carried out on the Baltic coast. At a depth of 5-10, sometimes 20-30 meters, an amber-bearing layer is found - "blue earth". She is really greenish blue.
It is a sandy-clayey glauconite-quartz rock enriched with amber. "Blue earth" is sieved, washed and amber is separated from it. In 1 cubic meter of rock there are on average 1,000 - 1,500 grams of amber. "Blue Earth" is rich not only in amber, but also in phosphorites - a valuable fertilizer for fields. The glauconite contained in it is a potash fertilizer.
Recently it was found that in the "blue earth" there is a lot of succinic acid - a valuable product that was previously mined only from amber. It turns out that the "blue earth" itself is a mineral. The bulk of the mined amber is small stones ranging in size from 2 to 32 millimeters, sometimes they are found with a loaf, very rarely - with a loaf of bread. Only about 10 percent of the extracted amber can be used for jewelry and amber crafts, all the rest of the amber is recycled.
Amber is an organic mineral, the hardened resin of conifers that grew about 40 million years ago, in the Tertiary period. Now it seems clear and understandable to everyone. But it was not always so. For a long time, scientists could not figure out the secret of the origin of this unusual stone.
Some seriously assured that amber was the petrified tears of birds, others that it was a product of lynx urine, and still others that amber emerged from the silt heated by the sun. Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) was probably the first to talk about the plant origin of amber from the liquid resin of spruce, hardened under the influence of cold and time.
Pliny cited indisputable proofs of the correctness of his explanation: when rubbed, amber smells of resin, burns with a smoky flame, like the resin of a coniferous tree, and contains insect inclusions. This opinion was not immediately established in science. In the second century AD, amber was considered a special whale excretion, something like amber.
In the 16th century G. Agricola suggested that amber is formed from liquid bitumen, while bitumen is released on the seabed from crevices, hardens in the air and turns into amber. In 1741 MV Lomonosov compiled a catalog of the collections of the Mineral Cabinet of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
After examining the samples of amber, the Russian scientist expressed categorical objections to the opinion widespread in those years that amber can be obtained from sulfuric acid, any combustible substance and rock.
Distribution of amber in Europe (according to V. Katinas 1971):
1 - the supposed area of ancient "amber forests";
2 - amber in tertiary deposits;
3 - boundary of distribution of redeposited amber.
The most correct ideas about how amber deposits are formed were expressed by G. Convenz in 1890. According to him, in the era preceding the deposition of the "blue earth", north of the Kaliningrad Peninsula, on the site of the Baltic Sea, there was dry land and dense subtropical forests grew. There were many coniferous trees in them, which gave off sap, which later turned into amber.
Sometimes the shape of the pieces of amber helps to understand how it was formed. There are pieces on which several layers are clearly visible. It is clear that the mass increased with periodic outflows of resin from the tree. Amber comes across in the form of icicles, balls and drops. The resin flowed down the trunks and branches, accumulated in the cracks and in the subcrustal layer. In the air, it thickened and became covered with an oxidized crust - a patina, with a rough, goose-like surface.
The pine, from the sap of which the Baltic amber was formed, scientists call in Latin "pinus succinifera". Hence, amber began to be called "succinite". The closest to the Baltic succinite are amber, which is found on the coast of the North Sea, in the region of Kiev and Kharkov, in the Carpathians. All other fossil resins - "amber" Baikal, Sakhalin, Mexican, Greenlandic, Brazilian, American and others - are just amber-like resins.
People have long attributed wonderful properties to amber, surrounded it with legends and beliefs. In old books you can find up to fifty recipes for medicines made from amber. The medieval author Razi (Razes) recommended rubbing the amber with a cloth and removing the foreign body from the eye. In the old days, in wealthy houses, the nurse was put on a massive amber necklace around the neck, while it was believed that amber would not let the bad go from the nurse to the child, that the child would grow up healthy and strong. Until now, people believe that the amber necklace will protect against goiter - Graves' disease.
At a temperature of 150 degrees Celsius, amber softens, and at 250-400 degrees, it melts, emitting a pleasant pine smell. Pieces of amber have long been burned for fragrant incense in temples and churches. Ethiopians and Egyptians used amber to embalm corpses. Amber and its processed products are used for medicinal purposes and in our time for the preparation of certain medicines. Employees of the Leningrad Agricultural Institute have found that succinic acid is a biogenic stimulant: it accelerates the growth and development of crops such as corn, flax, soybeans, wheat, and potatoes.
In the Kuban, experiments are being carried out on the use of succinic acid on fruit and berry plantations. By color and degree of transparency, amber is divided into several varieties: transparent, cloudy, smoky (translucent only in thin fragments), bone and foamy (opaque). This division is to some extent arbitrary, because in one piece of amber there can be transparent, cloudy, smoky, and bone, and foamy areas.
The transparent side is usually the side that was facing the sun on the tarry in the amber forest. Transparent amber is very beautiful, its shades can be very different. Cloudy amber gives the stone bizarre patterns, sometimes reminiscent of cumulus clouds, tongues of flame, etc. Smoky stone is not so clean and transparent, it looks like it is dusty, but it can also be amazingly beautiful. Opal-like amber with a bluish color is rarely found.
Foamy amber in appearance resembles dirty (due to the admixture of charred plant residues) frozen foam. It is opaque, light to dark gray and is the lightest and most porous variety. The more transparent amber, the denser and harder it is, and the higher its specific gravity. Transparent amber is the most fragile. A piece of amber contains many microscopic voids of a round and spherical shape. The transparency of amber depends on the number and size of these voids.
In cloudy amber, the largest voids are 0.02 millimeters, in smoky amber - up to 0.012, in bone amber - up to 0.004, and in foamy amber - it ranges from several micrometers to millimeters. It is estimated that in cloudy amber there are 600 voids in one square millimeter, and in bone amber - up to 900 thousand. Various colors of amber - white, pale yellow, honey-yellow, brown, blue or green - as well as its transparency, are due to voids.
It all depends on how the light is scattered when passing through one or another piece of amber. Green shades in amber appear when the voids that scatter white light are separated by a layer of dense transparent amber. In bone amber, the voids are located so that the light in them, scattering, creates a white and pale yellow color. Finally, brownish spots in bone and smoky amber are due to the fact that brown matter envelops the walls of large voids. Thus, the color of amber can be called false, it is a light effect.
In terms of chemical composition, amber belongs to high-molecular compounds of organic acids, a mineral of plant origin, consisting of about 10 carbon atoms, 16-hydrogen and 1 oxygen. The specific gravity of amber ranges from 0.98 to 1.08 g / cm3. Therefore, in salty sea water, it is in suspension. One of the most remarkable features of amber is that it quite often contains insects, flowers and leaves like preserved, intact by time, fossil insects.
For a long time, such inclusions in amber were considered only imprints, because every time a stone was opened, nothing was found but emptiness. In 1903, the Russian scientist Kornilovich, followed by the German researchers Lengerken and Potoni, found in amber the chitinous cover of insects, the remains of their internal organs, and striated muscles.
The study of insects and plant remains, which turned out to be walled up in amber, showed that almost all of them are enclosed in drip amber, between separate layers. Inherent amber is similar in structure to a multilayer shell; it easily pricks along the layering planes.
Such amber is rarely used for jewelry, but for scientists it is the most valuable, because it helps to see the organic world of the Paleogene period. Now collected several hundred species of insects, enclosed in amber. Among them are flies, bumblebees, ants, various beetles, butterflies, fleas, cockroaches. There are two hundred species of spiders in amber alone, ants - even more, and beetles - four hundred and fifty species.
A lizard without a tail was found in amber. This unique specimen was kept in the Western European Museum; it was seen by the outstanding Russian mineralogist AE Fersman. Found in amber footprints and feathers of thrush, squirrel wool. Even air bubbles enclosed in amber deserve attention: they can be used to determine what the gas composition of the Earth's atmosphere was.
In amber there are pieces of wood, flowers, pollen, needles, leaves, buds, yeasts and molds, lichens, mosses. The remains of a pine tree, a cinnamon tree, a palm tree related to the modern date palm, a branch with an oak leaf and flowers were found. The pieces of resin filling the wedge-shaped cracks in the wood were marked with tree-ring marks. They say that once Immanuel Kant, admiring a piece of amber with a fly enclosed in it, exclaimed: “Oh, if only you, little fly, could speak! How different would be all our knowledge of the past world! But, even without being speechless, the grains of a past life included in amber told the scientists a lot.
For example, insects are found in amber, the larvae of which, we know, can develop only in fast-flowing streams. Hence, we can conclude that the "amber forest" grew on the slopes of the mountains. In other pieces of amber, they find a swimming beetle. This indicates that the trees grew along the banks of standing water basins and swamps. The third group of insects found in amber suggests that the “amber forest” was warm and very humid.
When sugar silverfish, a heat-loving nocturnal insect, was found in amber, many were surprised. Nowadays, this insect lives in Egypt and other hot countries. Crickets and grasshoppers in amber are quite common, and they live in open, dry places, among the grass and bushes. There are especially many of them in mountainous countries with high average annual temperatures. Many springtails found in amber now live in Central and even Northern Europe.
Termites are often found in amber. These insects colonized dead conifers. They could get into the fresh resin only during the flight, which took place at the beginning of the rainy season. Judging by the fact that there are a lot of termites in amber, the time of their flight coincided with the season of the most intense resin release. The species composition of the termites indicates that the climate of the "amber forest" was close to the modern Mediterranean one.
In amber, they found cockroaches, which today live in the tropics and subtropics, dipterans that are now found most often in Northeast America between the 32nd and 40th parallels. There are no tropical species among the beetles, but there are many thermophilic species. Coleoptera insects of the “amber forest” were large and lived in a wide variety of conditions. Among them were species that live only in deciduous forests.
The abundance of aquatic and moisture-loving insects in amber suggests that the forests of the Paleogene period were humid, with numerous bodies of water. Having collected all this data bit by bit, we can imagine what the mysterious "amber forest" looked like and where it grew. Most likely, it grew on the hilly and mountainous land of Scandinavia and on the coastal plain bordered by the rocky land - the one that is now flooded by the Baltic Sea. On this vast territory, there were many rivers and lakes, along the banks of which mixed coniferous-deciduous forests grew, characteristic of the moderately warm and subtropical belt.
The climate was warm throughout the year, with well-defined dry and wet seasons. The average annual temperature reached 20 degrees Celsius. The soils in the forest were sandy, and there were many wetlands on the plain. There were many shrubs and grasses on the outskirts of the forest. In places, the forests bordered on rocky and sandy areas without vegetation. Moisture-loving plants gravitated towards lakes and swamps.
The forest was full of all kinds of insects, birds and animals. The increased humidity of the air and soil in the "amber forest" favored the intensive release of resin. Over time, the resin hardened and the trees died off. Pieces of resin accumulated in the forest soil, streams and rivers carried them out to sea. There they accumulated in calm bays - a "blue land" was formed.
Not all fossil resins can be called amber. In Africa, New Zealand and other countries, the so-called copal is found - a fossil resin from the Quaternary era. Compared to real amber, digging is much softer. This resin is "not ripe". She still needs to lie in the ground. In a few million years it will become a real amber.
And here in Taimyr there is known amber, which lies in chalk deposits, which are older than the "blue earth" of the Baltic states. The formation of amber, that is, the petrification of resins, is a natural and logical process on Earth. It took place in previous geological eras and is taking place in our time.
This famous Amber Room was an amazing and one of a kind masterpiece of artistic processing and decorative use of amber. During the Great Patriotic War, the fascist invaders, having robbed the palace, kidnapped and took her away.
In 1945, the Amber Room disappeared, its further fate is still unknown. Felkerzam, a connoisseur of precious and ornamental stones, describes the Amber Room as follows:
The famous Russian architect V. V. Rastrelli mounted the room in the Catherine Palace. The room turned out to be too big, there were not enough amber panels. Rastrelli added mirrors on white and gold mirror holders, mirrored pilasters.
The Amber Room. A tragic page in the history of the palace is associated with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Most of its ceremonial interiors perished, the unique decoration of the Amber Room disappeared without a trace.
The historical amber collection was more “lucky” - it was evacuated to Novosibirsk and returned to Tsarskoe Selo after the war. Now the collection of the Amber Room, numbering about 200 items, is one of the most significant in Russia. You can admire it in the Amber Storeroom, located on the ground floor of the Catherine Palace.