AMBER SECRETS OF BELARUS!
Ignorantia non est argumentum - ignorance is not proof.
The funny thing is that geologists has long been they talk about a single Baltic-Dnieper amber-bearing province . Findings of amber on the territory of Belarus have been known for a long time. The vast majority of them are confined to the south-west of the country, mainly to the territory of Brest Polissya.... but representatives of official geology in the Republic of Belarus do not recognize amber in the republic ... however, this does not prevent free prospectors in the Republic of Belarus from looking for it ...AMBER MINING IN RB "... On the black market in Belarus on sale you can find amber. The sellers claim that the amber is Belarusian. In e it's hard to believe. In Belarus there are no known enterprises for the development of industrial amber. But scientists have confirmed that there are amber deposits here. It turns out that this was already known in19 80s. But where did this gem come from? In fact, he has no place on Belarusian territory. Near Brest, in the village. Leninsky is a peat briquette plant. It was here, on abandoned sites, after the extraction of peat, pebbles of different colors began to come across. People walked and literally stumbled over yellow blocks. But no one guessed what it was. Later, geologists found that thisT amber stone. People began to come here with shovels in the hope of finding something. They were often lucky. They came across pieces of solar stone weighing from 1 to 2 kg. At some point, there were more miners here than geologists. And today there are unique samples. True, there are relatively fewer such finds...." WHERE AMBER IN RB ? It turns out that there were enough signs that there are deposits of amber in the area. But it took scientists 20 years to start studying the territory. The research geological enterprise rather late took up the survey of the layers of the local earth. Thus, a wide strip was revealed to the north of Brest, where one should look for amber. Scientists predicted that local reserves of the gem would be approximately 6,000 tons. This is much more than, for example, the rich Palmniken amber deposit, where this stone has been mined for quite a long time. And this fact itself was very striking for those who discovered the sun stone in these places.
Let's look across the border with Ukraine to the Republic of Belarus, the border with the Dubrovitsky district ... Everyone who is interested in amber has heard about Ukrainian amber in the so-called. "amber triangle" Sarny-Dubrovitsa-Klesovo... but few people have heard of the amber of Belarus... The area between the villages of Sarny, Klesovo and Dubrovitsy is commonly called the "Amber Triangle". Amber containingl oh, it is located shallow here, which greatly simplifies extraction, and makes it cheaper .. Where is amber mined in Ukraine. Klesovo-Dubrovitskoye field Amber in Ukraine is represented by gems mined in the so-called "amber triangle", covering the area of Sarn, Klesov and Dubrovitsa. This field is located on the territory of North-Western Ukraine, within the Rivne, Volyn, Zhytomyr and Kyiv regions. Its total area is more than 200 km2, of which the main part falls on the Klesovsky quarry. The depth of this mine is up to 50 m, while the area is up to 2500 thousand m2. The Ukrainian gem is shallow, so it is much easier and cheaper to extract it. The main part of the crystals is located at a depth of 3 to 10 m, while their content per cubic meter of parent rock is up to 250 g, and there are areas where this figure exceeds 1000 g/m3. The parameters of the main part of the fragments are from 1 to 10 cm, but sometimes there are stones with a diameter of more than 15 cm. They can weigh more than a kilogram! All these combined characteristics make the Klesovo-Dubrovitskoye field one of the richest and most promising. According to experts, the reserves of precious stone in it are more than 1,500 tons, while 95% of the mined amber is of high jewelry quality, monochrome color, transparency and unique colors. Source: http://yantar.in.ua/blog/otkuda-beretsya-yantar.html Large deposits of amber were discovered by scientists in Belarus. In terms of quality, it is not inferior to the famous Baltic. For the workers of the Gatcha-Osovsky peat briquette plant, amber is no longer a novelty. Every summer, when a new season for peat extraction opens, excavator buckets, together with peat mass and sand, raisewash amber. To date, peat deposits in Gatcha-Osovo are running out, which means that the plant will have to be closed. People will be left without work, the village will wither away. Almost all of its inhabitants are workers of this factory. At the same time, the plant literally stands on amber deposits, which, according to experts, can be more than 350 tons. Only amber can save the enterprise. The factory knows about it. And they are even ready to open a new workshop - for its processing. Nikolai Bortnik, director of the Gatcha-Osovsky peat briquette plant, emphasized that only this option would ensure the profitability of production. The locals here have always collected a lot of amber and made various souvenirs from it. They say that it is literally under your feet. The specific bright color of amber is very clearly visible on the peat bog after rain. 30 tons of amber found near Zhabinka December 7, 2015 | The distant ancestors of the Belarusians lived by gathering. But even in our age of smartphones and tablets, many people walk through the fields and swamps in search of what the resource-poor Belarusian land has accumulated. And collect rocks. Amber. The facts of illegal mining of the mineral were recorded in four districts of the Brest region. "This year, the facts of illegal extraction of amber by residents of the surrounding villages were recorded in four districts of the Brest region - Kobrinsky, Zhabinkovsky, Berezovsky, Drogichinsky. They are mined by hydraulic reclamation, mainly on peat bogs, including on the territory of the Sporovsky nature reserve," she said. "Evening Brest" Chairman of the Regional Committee of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Tamara Yalkovskaya. THE OFFICIALS STRONGLY DO NOT GIVE UP AND DO NOT RECOGNIZE THE AMBER OF BELARUS!.. source http://www.vb.by/society/10163.html "... Belarusian geologists really discovered amber in sand and gravel deposits at the bottom of the drained swamps of the Brest region, which in its properties and beauty practically does not differ from the world-famous Baltic amber. But its extraction is not yet carried out, the found deposits are only being explored. This means that there are no beads made of Belarusian amber yet. Leisure "professors" from the markets should know that Belarusian amber was plowed by glaciers from the same Cretaceous-Paleogene rocks and displaced by subsequent glacial processes, that is, the age of our amber is the same 70-40 million years. Many products at the bazaar-tent merchants are made handicraft from the lowest-grade varieties of amber. At the Kaliningrad plant, amber of this quality is used mainly for melting, followed by the production of amber varnish and dry acid...." IN FACT THE AMBER OF BELARUS WAS, IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE. Meanwhile NOT EVERYTHING IS SO GOOD IN AMBER BELARUS... The legislation prohibits citizens from arbitrarily searching for and extracting minerals that are considered the exclusive property of the state. The Code of Administrative Offenses of the Republic of Belarus provides: Article 15.14. Unauthorized production of survey works Unauthorized exploration work entails a warning or a fine in the amount of up to twenty basic units, and for an individual entrepreneur - from ten to fifty basic units. Article 10.1. Violation of the right of state ownership of subsoil Unauthorized use of subsoil or transactions that violate the right of state ownership of subsoil entails the imposition of a fine in the amount of five to thirty basic units, for an individual entrepreneur - up to one hundred and fifty basic units, and for a legal entity - up to five hundred basic units. HELLO TO ALL AMBER MINERS OF THE RB AND MORE TO YOU IN THE SWAMPS OF RB SUN STONE!.. TO EVERYONE WHO IS INTERESTED IN SEARCH BOLOTNOY YANTARIA IN RB, WRITE ME BY E-MAIL... Used in this story s source And :
In the Zhabinkovsky district, in the Gatcha swamp massif, amber is being mined. Here Belgeopoisk is implementing its pilot project. And this means that the bowels of the Brest region contain a golden-radiant stone.
Up to ten kilograms of amber are mined in Gatcha every week. But it is too early to talk about the volume of its reserves and quality, experts say.
Searched in seven districts
When, about 20 years ago, a student research group of the Brest Pedagogical Institute, on my initiative, began to systematically search for amber in the peat-marshy deposits of seven districts of the region - Brest, Kobrinsky, Zhabinkovsky, Pinsky, Berezovsky, Luninets and Stolinsky, it seemed to everyone an unnecessary and incredible thing. But students are a restless people: we found samples of excellent quality amber in more than 30 points of the region. True, there were not so many pieces of large sizes. But on the other hand, samples up to 10-20 cm made it possible to study a surprisingly beautiful palette of almost all shades of yellow - from light yellow matte to transparent honey-yellow and yellow-brown differences.
Based on the materials of our research, they wrote scientific, term papers and theses. Most of them were published in scientific collections and journals, and some of the works were awarded diplomas of the Ministry of Education of the BSSR. Our achievements should also include the found samples of amber with inclusions of invertebrates in them - silent witnesses of past geological eras, especially since in one of the samples an excellently preserved ant was found, the species of which was hitherto unknown to science. And this is already a great success.
The biggest stone
Now lovers of amber, this truly beautiful formation, can see its best samples at the stands of the Brest Museum of Local Lore, BrSU and the Regional Committee of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection. But samples in the local history museum of the city of Bereza in the form of unprocessed pieces weighing 82 and 518 grams, respectively, became a special museum pride. The latter, by the way, is the largest amber in terms of size and weight, which is not found in other museums in Belarus. And these samples were found by schoolchildren from the villages of Osovtsy and Leoshki-Samoilovichi Ekaterina Sinitskaya and Andrei Burym. The guys found wonderful samples and brought them to the Berezovsky Museum themselves. And here it is necessary to express special gratitude to the local teachers of geography, who instilled in their students a true love for their native land and pride in its natural resources.
And these riches in the Brest region are not so few: these are chalk and chalk-marl rocks, clay, sands and sand and gravel mixtures, variously colored chalcedony, basalt and building stone, peat, sapropels, phosphorites, native and sulfide gold, medicinal and rare earth brines, drinking and mineral water, in the future - diamonds and semiprecious raw materials. Museum samples are also noted: marcasite in the form of nodules and nodules, iron oxides and hydroxides, fossilized flints, sea urchins, belemnites, shells of various mollusks, teeth of sharks and mammoths, flint tools in the form of scrapers, plates, knives, hammers, tips arrows and liners. And not all museums can boast of such exhibits.
Our region is not so poor in mineral raw materials and needs to expand its mineral resource base and search for new mineral deposits.
Albert BOGDASAROV, professor
Every week in the Gatcha swamp in the Brest region, miners receive up to 10 kilograms of precious stone. Scientists are not in a hurry to talk about the development prospects. It is necessary not only to assess the volume of reserves, but also to make sure of the high quality of amber.
Calculate the costs, possible profits and estimate whether the game is worth the candle. The correspondent went to the Zhabinkovsky district to watch how a sun stone of extraordinary beauty is taken out of an ordinary swamp.
Amber from the glacier
Many people talk about deposits of amber in our depths, but only a few manage to see the precious stone. Amber is on the maps of geologists, in museum expositions, in photographs posted in scientific collections. Unprocessed pieces of stone are found by archaeologists at Paleolithic sites, whose age exceeds 13 thousand years. Products made of fossilized resin, such as beads, earrings, animal figurines, scientists find in the burials of the Mesolithic era. A research student group, created at the Pushkin State Pedagogical Institute in Brest, discovered more than three dozen amber deposits back in the 80s of the last century.
Then a full-scale exploration began. Today, several sites with amber deposits are known in the Drogichinsky, Berezovsky, Pinsk, Stolin and Luninets regions. The most promising and explored in detail are deposits in the Gatcha-Osovsky swamp peat massif between Zhabinka and Kobrin. Here, at a depth of two to five meters lies about 2.5 tons of amber. However, these data are very approximate. It is difficult to accurately estimate reserves. In any case, they are small. For comparison: about 300 tons of valuable stone are mined annually at the deposits in the Kaliningrad region.
Geologist Aleksey ANISKO said that large amber nuggets are rare. The average fraction of Belarusian amber is about three centimeters.
We have Quaternary deposits of amber, and in the Kaliningrad region, as in Ukraine, there are indigenous ones, which are more than 50 million years old. What does it mean? Amber appeared on our territory thanks to the arrival of a glacier. It melted, and the stones settled in low-lying places, which turned into swamps, - explains the director of Belgeopoisk LLC Oleg Pivovarchik.
Day to day does not fall
We met with Oleg Pivovarchik outside the village of Barantsy, Zhabinka district. On the "SUV" we overcome a couple of kilometers along a washed out road. There is no further way. I change my sneakers for rubber boots, I climb into the salon of the old man GAZ-66. The driver, clutching the steering wheel, is trying to overcome the rest of the route. This is done with difficulty. GAS sneaks through deep pits, “hangs out” on embankments, kneads mud in huge ruts, and gets over a narrow gauge railway. The driver takes a breath.
We stop at a small trailer. This is a security post. The decor is simple: a video surveillance system console, a small sofa and a safe in which a week's supply of amber is stored. Guards show sealed packages ready to be shipped. The director of Belgeopoisk comments:
At this amber manifestation, we make a trial extraction of a stone. In a week we get about 10 kilograms of amber. Sometimes a little more, sometimes less. We collect the stone, seal it and send it to Minsk for examination every seven days. But it is still too early to draw any preliminary conclusions. One thing can be said: we have amber.
Headed by Oleg Pivovarchik, Belgeopoisk LLC is a young organization established under the Administration of the President in the form of a public-private partnership. It was registered last year to regulate the amber market, where illegal miners have revived. It is Belgeopoisk that conducts trial mining of amber in the Gatcha-Osovsky swamp massif.
A submersible pump delivers the rock to the screening device. The sand leaves, and everything else is moved by hand.
Now we are working on deposit number two, - continues Oleg Pivovarchik. - Its area is about 20 thousand square meters. Trial mining began in July. However, before that, we collected all the data on previous geological explorations, studied the information, and prepared project documentation. In this array, 2,500 exploration wells were drilled, and in total in Polesie - about 5,500. 22 deposits have been delineated here, 15 of them are swamped. The depth of occurrence of amber is up to three meters. Up to six in places.
Oleg Pivovarchik draws attention: amber in the Gatcha bog massif lies unevenly. Shows a map showing the content of amber. For example, in one of the wells, a ton of rock contains one and a half kilograms of valuable stone, and in the next one - only nine grams. Huge difference.
With entrepreneur Pavel Baltsevich we sit in a motor boat. Pavel is from the Lida region, he is engaged in sand mining. In the Polissya swamp, he works as a contractor, but instead of sand, he extracts amber.
This is an ordinary dredger, but it had to be seriously modified, - Pavel Baltsevich leads the tour. - Its basis is an Italian submersible pump, which from a depth of 6 meters lifts the rock along the slurry pipeline and feeds it to the screening device. The sand leaves, and everything else is moved by hand. We used a variety of components from different machines, which were literally “on the knee” combined into a single mechanism.
One of the components of the dredger is an excavator. You can't do without it. The swamp is overgrown with bushes and reeds - a powerful machine is clearing a place for the pump to be immersed. Workers and specialists complain that they have to follow in the footsteps of illegal miners:
Here they work in the winter when the swamp freezes. Motor pumps are used. A powerful jet of water knocks out huge holes, light amber floats to the surface. Due to their activities, the layers are mixed in many places, which makes the work very difficult. Our pump often brings to the surface traces of illegal immigrants in these places: empty beer and vodka bottles, packs of cigarettes. Do you see a bush on a hill straight ahead? Illegals also worked there ...
Geologist Aleksey Anisko works at amber mining for the first time. New experiences are always interesting. He takes out a plastic jar, shows today's "catch". Several dozen stones of different colors, shapes and sizes. The cherry on the cake is honey-colored amber, almost the size of a palm. The largest nugget mined at Gatcha is a 100-gram handsome man. In diameter, its length reaches ten centimeters, and the cost is one thousand dollars. But such finds are rare. The average fraction of Belarusian amber is about three centimeters. However, its main advantage is by no means the size, but the color scheme:
We came across stones of various colors: honey, pomegranate, lemon. Such diversity is highly valued in the jewelry industry. We document all information obtained during the test mining process. Then it will be used to assess the prospects for the extraction of amber on an industrial scale.
Amber, this sunny cut stone, was popular in centuries past, and today it is experiencing a resurgence in popularity.
Where is it mined?
It used to be believed that there were no large deposits of amber in Belarus, at least that's what the exploration "canons" said. Amber should not be formed on the lands now included in the borders of this country. However, recently, in the eighties of the XX century, amber "nuggets" began to be found in the vicinity of Brest, at a former peat processing factory. Until now, both legal and "poaching" amber mining takes place there. Sometimes prospectors come across pieces of resin up to several kilograms in size! Deposits of sun stone have also been discovered in other swampy areas.
Illegal mining of amber in Belarus Where could amber come from, because it is formed under completely different conditions? The answer is simple - several tons of stone were once brought to the territory of modern Belarus by a glacier. This happened in the Quaternary period.
The country's industry is gradually mastering more and more new sources of this ornamental stone. It is possible to find deposits of “more precisely, localization” of amber of various shades - honey, lemon, even a little reddish.
Border guards and customs officers continually detain drivers who are trying to illegally take amber out of Belarus. Only this year - three high-profile cases. In February, a resident of the Minsk region was carrying 12 kilograms of solar stone to Lithuania through the Kamenny Log border crossing. The cargo was in the spare tire of the Volkswagen. In April, customs officers found 18 unprocessed stones at the Varshavsky Most checkpoint. And in June, the State Border Committee already announced the detention of a Brest resident who tried to leave for Poland by hiding minerals in the seat of a car.
In the Pinsk region, "black prospectors" failed
If before the border guards detained only carriers, then this summer they encountered "black diggers" who tried to wash jewelry right at the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. Illegals were spotted by a drone. Three miners, who deployed a motor pump to flush the soil, were tied up by an alarm group. Assistant to the head of the Pinsk border detachment, Mikhail But-Gusaim, says that they did not manage to get anything, but they had to pay a decent fine for damage to nature and violation of border legislation - more than 150 million non-denominated rubles.
Remarkably, the "diggers" worked according to the "Ukrainian" technology. As you know, our neighbors right at the Belarusian border were seized by amber fever. Local residents massively mine solar stones, throwing them later on the black market. This is where the logical question arises: do we have similar deposits in Polissya? Scientists answer: there are many. And not only on the border with Ukraine. Another thing is that at the state level no one undertakes large-scale mining of amber yet. So the "black miners" come there, creating a problem for the border guards, police and environmentalists. "Diggers" have been on their hook for a long time, which is periodically confirmed by criminal cases for illegal mining.
Amber deposits in our bowels are like a ghost. Many talk about them, but only a few manage to see them. Amber is on the maps of geologists, in the pictures posted in manuals and scientific collections, but you cannot touch it. Unprocessed pieces of stone are found by archaeologists at Paleolithic sites, whose age exceeds 13 thousand years. Products made of fossilized resin - for example, beads, earrings, animal figurines - scientists find in the burials of the Mesolithic era. Research student group, created at the State Pedagogical Institute. A.S. Pushkina in Brest, back in the 80s of the last century, discovered more than three dozen amber deposits.
Then a full-scale exploration began. Today, seven sites with deposits of amber are known for sure, which are also found in Polissya. In particular, in the Drogichinsky, Berezovsky, Pinsk, Stolin and Luninets regions. The most promising and explored in detail are deposits in the Gatcha swampy peat massif near Zhabinka. There, right under the peat bogs at a depth of two to five meters, more than 300 tons of amber are stored. By world standards, this is not much, given that, for example, in the deposits in the Kaliningrad region, so much and even more amber is mined during the year.
Samples of amber from the deposits of the Brest region are stored in the Brest Regional Museum of Local Lore
However, you should be happy about this. Moreover, our amber can be easily ground and polished, and small fragments can be easily pressed. That is why it is not inferior to its Baltic counterparts, and jewelry made from Belarusian minerals meets all international standards. Experimental samples of amber are in the funds of the Brest Regional Museum of Local Lore. And if we start working on the development of existing deposits, new ones may be found in the future. There are prerequisites for this. Question: where to start?
The fact is that no one touched the Belarusian amber in Soviet times. Then the Baltic mines were developed. The exception was the work of the all-Union trust "Westkvartssamotsvety". This enterprise supervised the bowels of Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. Already in perestroika times, its specialists carried out geological exploration near the village of Leninsky in the Kobrin district, started drilling, after which they said that the deposit was unpromising. At the same time, the mined amber was never shown to anyone, although the workers - from the locals - saw large pieces of solar stone ...
Later, during the years of independence, the specialists of the research geological enterprise "BelGEO" conducted a second study there, which showed that there is still amber: 325 tons lie on an area of about 300 hectares. However, in the post-Soviet years, a new mining and processing industry would require investments, and it was problematic to draw up a business plan in which profits would significantly exceed costs. Therefore, no one took seriously the development.
Another difficulty is that part of the Belarusian amber was redeposited by the glacier and water-glacial flows, and therefore it is distributed very unevenly. It is difficult to extract it by traditional methods, by drilling. It is necessary to make a continuous excavation, which means that on 300 hectares near Zhabinka a large reservoir can be formed - like the Minsk Sea. However, there are pluses here too: sand that will go into construction, the creation of fish farms, a tourist recreation area, and, of course, amber itself is a fossil of considerable price. A regular fist-sized stone that will go into jewelry costs about $20-$25. And even a small mineral interspersed with the most ancient mosquito, midge or air of the era in which it was formed will already cost 150 - 200 and more dollars.
At the same time, some of the gems, for example, on the border with Ukraine, are not touched by the glacier at all, therefore they lie closer to the surface of the earth and it is much easier to extract them. Neighbors understood this - though not on a national scale. That is why amber mining has become a profitable business there, for which Ukrainians are ready to fight in the truest sense of the word. So, as it recently happened in the Volyn region on the border with the Drogichinsky district, where local miners prevented our border guards from demarcating. And the dispute was caused by the Zhirovsky Canal, from where, according to operational data, the prospectors took water to wash amber. According to an international treaty, it belongs to Belarus, and after demarcation, Ukrainians will be prohibited from entering here.
It remains to be hoped that in our country the plunderers of the bowels, bearing great harm to nature, will continue to come across in single copies. But it is obvious that the problem cannot be solved by force alone. It seems that sooner or later the state will have to take up the production itself or legally give this fishery into the hands of entrepreneurs.
LETTER OF THE LAW
For illegal mining of amber, the Code of Administrative Offenses of Belarus provides:
Article 15.14. Unauthorized production of survey works
Unauthorized exploration work entails a warning or a fine in the amount of up to twenty basic units, and for an individual entrepreneur - from ten to fifty basic units.
Article 10.1. Violation of the right of state ownership of subsoil
Unauthorized use of subsoil or transactions that violate the right of state ownership of subsoil entails the imposition of a fine in the amount of five to thirty basic units, for an individual entrepreneur - up to one hundred and fifty basic units, and for a legal entity - up to five hundred basic units.
Alexander Mityukov.
Albert BOGDASAROV,
Professor,
full member of the Belarusian Geographical Society.
Battle for the Amber Harvest
This summer, our neighbors in the Rivne region are undergoing a large-scale special operation to combat the amber mafia. Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko has already stated that the annual profit from amber mining is equal to the army budget:
Ukrainian security forces recapture amber from illegal immigrants
- According to preliminary estimates, in a year amber dealers earn as much as the country's military budget requires. Amber deposits are located almost throughout the Ukrainian Polissya. This is a serious prospect for the state. It is necessary to legalize what the local population is doing, but send money not to the pockets of bandits and policemen who cooperate with them, but to the state treasury.
However, the "amber kings" are in no hurry to give up. With the start of the special operation, the “diggers” of amber shot down two drones of the National Guard, and they met the special forces with weapons and in an armored vehicle. The Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Arsen Avakov, said that aerial photography recorded many armed people, armored vehicles and a horrifying picture of the devastation of nature in the Rivne Reserve. According to various estimates, from 120 to 300 tons of amber per year are illegally mined in the north-west of Ukraine. The volume of the "shadow" market is 200 - 300 million dollars. In the case of the "amber mafia" of the Rivne region, employees of the prosecutor's office, the SBU and the Ministry of Internal Affairs appear.
