All About Amber

Amber has been appreciated for its color and natural beauty since Neolithic times. Good quality amber is used for the manufacture of ornamental objects and jewelry..

What Does it Look Like?
Amber occurs in a range of different colors. As well as the usual yellow orange brown that is associated with the color "amber", amber itself can range from a whitish color through a pale lemon yellow, to brown and almost black. Other more uncommon colors include red amber (sometimes known as "cherry amber"), green amber, and even blue amber, which is rare and highly sought after.

Much of the most highly prized amber is transparent, in contrast to the very common cloudy amber and opaque amber. Opaque amber contains numerous minute bubbles. This kind of amber is known as "bony amber".

Although all Dominican amber is fluorescent, the rarest Dominican amber is blue amber. It turns blue in natural sunlight and any other partially or wholly ultraviolet light source. In long wave UV light it has a very strong reflection, almost white. Only about 100 kg is found per year, which makes it valuable and expensive.

Sometimes amber retains the form of drops and stalactites, just as it exuded from the ducts and receptacles of the injured trees. It is thought that, in addition to exuding onto the surface of the tree, amber resin also originally flowed into hollow cavities or cracks within trees, thereby leading to the development of large lumps of amber of irregular form.

How Does It Form?
Molecular polymerization, resulting from high pressures and temperatures produced by overlying sediment, transforms the resin first into copal. Sustained heat and pressure drives off turpenes and results in the formation of amber.

What is it Made of?
Amber (or, technically, resinite) is fossilized tree resin (not sap).

How Old Is It?
The oldest amber recovered dates to the Upper Carboniferous period (320 million years ago). It is most similar to the resins produced by flowering plants, which did not evolve until the Jurassic, around 180 million years ago. Amber becomes abundant soon afterwards, in the Early Cretaceous, 150 million years ago, when it is found in association with insects.

Commercially the most important types of amber are Baltic and Dominican amber. Dominican amber differentiates itself from Baltic amber by being mostly transparent and often containing a higher number of fossil inclusions. It is Amber’s unique ability to preserve otherwise unfossilizable parts of organisms that helps us reconstruct ecosystems and organisms that are long extinct. Amber can contains animals or plant matter that became caught in the resin as it was secreted. Insects, spiders and their webs, annelids, frogs, crustaceans, bacteria and amoebae, marine microfossils, wood, flowers and fruit, hair, feathers and other small organisms have been recovered in ambers dating to 130 million years ago.

What’s It Used For?
Amber has been used since antiquity (some 13,000 years ago) in the manufacture of jewelry and ornaments, and also forms the flavoring for akvavit liquor. Folklore attributed medicinal properties to it. Turkish fable has it that mouthpieces made from it prevents infection when pipes are shared. To this day it is used in the manufacture of smoking and glassblowing mouthpieces. Amber's place in culture and tradition lends it a tourism value; one museum is even dedicated to the mineral.

Where Can It Be Found
Prussia was and is the world's leading source of amber. About 90% of the world's extractable amber is still located in the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia on the Baltic Sea. Pieces of amber come from the sea floor, cast up by the waves, and collected by hand, dredging or diving. Elsewhere, amber is mined, both in open works and underground galleries. The nodules from the blue earth have to be freed from matrix and divested of their opaque crust, which can be done in revolving barrels containing sand and water. Erosion removes this crust from sea worn amber.

Dominican amber, especially Dominican blue amber, is mined through bell pitting, which is dangerous due to the risk of the tunnel collapse.