50 MILLION YEARS AGO
  

"Amber truly possesses a life-giving energy. It takes its beginning in luxuriant forests as old as the mother earth itself. Later waters and masses of ground fell on them. However the treasures of those times survived preserved in it, therefore amber contains joy and happiness. >From ancient times people living in the territory of our motherland used to dug amber out if its burying places and enrich it with something from their own lives. They would inscribe pieces of amber with their feelings along with nice wishes, put them on strings, and give as gifts to their beloved ones so that they could accompany them in this or another life."

Vydūnas

If you ask any Lithuanian about the origin of amber, most probably you will hear a legend of an unhappy love between goddess Juratė and fisherman Kastytis. God Perkūnas, after finding out that the mortal son of earth dared to touch the Goddess of the Baltic's, threw down a bolt of lightning, which shattered the amber palace on the bottom of the sea and drowned Kastytis together with his boat. Ever since waves have been washing ashore pieces of amber - fragments of the palace and after storms the shore is strewn smaller pieces - Jūratė's tears that she is still continuing to shed.

What is amber?
Formation
Morphology
Inclusions
Colours
From soil and water
Treatment
Real or not?
Qualities
Amber routes
Archeological finds
Amber in
medicine
Relatives throughout the World
Museum in museum

Scientists say that amber (or succinite) is a fossil pine resin that has achieved a stable state through oxidation, action of micro-organisms and other processes. If we want to image how everything happened, we should travel some tens of millions of years back to the southern regions of the present-day Scandinavia and nearby regions of the bed of the Baltic Sea (the formation of the Baltic Sea began only 13 thousand years ago) where conifer forests grew more than 55 million years ago.
The climate became warmer and conifer trees started to exude big amounts of resin. Any smallest wound caused excessive flow of resin. Of course, today there is no one type of pine which had similar characteristics to those of the fossil trees.

The transformation of resin into amber continued from the moment of secretion until its burial into Sambia deposit. Due to various processes resins underwent different changes and a material which was not similar to the original resins was formed. Later amber was washed out and brought to different river backwaters. The layer of amber was covered by delta sediments and survives to the present day. One cubic meter of this rock, which is called blue ground, contains from 0,5 to 2,5 kilogram amber. The biggest known deposit of amber is 7-8 meter thick layer of such ground 30-40 cm below sea level near Palvininkai.
It is thought that in the whole region of western Sambia Peninsular there are several hundred thousand tons of amber, and in Courland Lagoon, near Juodkrantė, 3000 hectares of amber-containing ground have been found.
In this region of Baltic sea aproximately 90 per cent of all amber (fossil resins) in the world are found.

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