Location and methods of amber extraction
Most people associate amber with nuggets found on sandy beaches.
However, what we currently find on them is only a small percentage of global amber extraction. Mostly Baltic amber is deposited underground. The world’s largest deposits are located in the Kalinigradz Oblast, in Ukraine and in Poland in the Chłapów region.
The oldest way to obtain amber is to fish it with the help of special nets fixed on the rim of the so-called “Kaszorki.” Fishermen dressed in long rubber pants collect what hides the Baltic bottom. On the shore, they search for fished treasures, hoping that they will find a golden nugget. Amber deposited underground is extracted using a hydraulic or open-pit method. The hydraulic method is based on the fact that in the mining area a farm is created, into the hole through which we extract amber under pressure water is injected, under the influence of pressure, the amber with spoil is taken up. It’s all caught up in the net. Then, to separate the amber from the rest, it is rinsed in water with salt using density differences: the amber floats, the rest sinks. The essence of the open-pit method is to remove the overburden lying over amber and to wash the sieves of different density of extracted ore. The largest quantities of amber come from the mines. In the Kalinigradz Oblast (Sambia), amber is deposited ~ 50 m below the surface of the earth and is extracted using the opencast method. In the Chłapowo area it is deposited much deeper ~ 150 m below the surface. Despite the fact that the resources in Poland are six times larger than in Sambia, for the time being it is not possible to extract them.
