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.
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 of "R" 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.
- "Shishiga" is power. Other equipment will not pass here. You can, of course, go on foot, but there is a risk of falling into one of the pits washed out by illegal amber miners. They have done a good job in these parts.
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.
In the footsteps of the miners
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.
A dredge rumbles a hundred meters from the shore. Let's get on board. Here, several workers are on a two-week watch together with the senior geologist of Belgeopoisk LLC Alexei Anisko.
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.
Belarusian sun stone is taken from a swamp near the village of Barantsy, Zhabinka district, Brest region. One of the 22 deposits explored in recent years at the Gatcha-Osovsky amber occurrence is located here. According to geological exploration data, up to 2.5 tons of valuable fossilized resin rest at the pilot site, where trial operation is underway.
From Barantsy to deposit No. 2, about 10 minutes off-road. The most difficult section is the last 500 meters to the swamp. Here you have to either walk or drive a decommissioned fire truck Gaz-66. The workers say that the Niva can also pass - but this is not certain. Nearby is a narrow-gauge railway that leads from nowhere to nowhere. She is here for the future: if "amber tramples."
"Shishiga" stops near the guard's booth. There is a motorboat at the makeshift pier. The ship delivers workers and geologists through the swamp to the platform, where the trial production of the Belarusian solar stone is underway. Previously, only black diggers operated here, now it is a contractor.
The area of the deposit on which trial operation is being carried out is 19,800 square meters. m. In the pilot area of the Gatcha-Osovsky swamp massif, 22 deposits have been identified and explored. According to the project, they contain 2.5 tons of amber. In the developed deposit No. 2, the reserves are 345 kg.
- The depth of amber according to the project is up to four meters. According to the results of our exploration - up to six meters. The conditions are difficult - it's still a swamp. The deposit is uneven, extremely unstable along strike and depth. There are empty places, there are squares in which there is a high concentration. This indicates that these are Quaternary deposits - amber came here with glaciers and settled in swamps. This is an extremely difficult field. Amber concentrations per ton of host rock fluctuate: here, for example, 100 grams of amber per ton, and after five meters it can already be 0 grams per ton, - explains the director of Belgeopoisk LLC Oleg Pivovarchik.
The pump is Italian, the pontoons are military, the cabin is from a combine
With representatives of the contractor, we get into the boat and go to the platform. Outwardly, it resembles a huge amphibious harvester, which is bogged down in the cab in a swamp. In the front part there is a control panel for an Italian deep-well pump for 50,000 euros. Behind - a bucket for loosening peat.
— The unit was created on the basis of the Dragflow submersible pump, Italy. Grids were bought to separate the sand from the coarse fraction and sort the amber. Power plant UES 2250 (harvester - TUT.BY) manufactured by Gomselmash. The pontoons are military. We had to assemble all this in a bunch ourselves and set it up so that it worked, - recalls a representative of the contracting company Pavel Baltsevich.
The pump descends to a depth and sucks in the amber-bearing rock. Then the mass is fed through the slurry pipeline to a sieve with a four-millimeter gap.
- Everything that is less than four millimeters: sand, water - goes away. The rest - gets on the conveyor belt, where there is a manual bulkhead. In this deposit, according to the design and estimate documentation, we must wash 56 thousand cubic meters of rock. The fraction of amber-bearing rock more than 4 mm is approximately 20%. Geologists sort out peat together with workers and select amber. We tried many methods, but only this one allowed us to significantly increase productivity,” explained Oleg Anatolyevich.
Geologists at the deposit work on a rotational basis: two weeks after two. At the end of the working day, they take the mined stones from the platform, take them to a guard car, where they place them in a transparent bag and seal them. Then they will be sent to specialists in Minsk for examination and evaluation.
- We take samples, fix the depth of occurrence, in what rocks. Our geological information is then logged, documented, and will be used in approving reserves. So far, we are carrying out trial operation of the deposit in order to assess the prospects for industrial production of amber, - said the senior geologist of Belgeopoisk LLC Alexey Anisko.
“Our stone is very dense. Kaliningrad - transparent"
Over the past eight days of work, 18 transparent bags with amber have been collected. The total weight of the mined is 13 kg. The largest fraction is 10 centimeters across and about 100 grams of weight. According to experts, on the market such a copy can cost more than $ 1,000.
“We can say that we have gone down in history. The first amber was smaller, and then the larger fractions went,” said Alexei Anisko. - Our amber has a very diverse range of colors, unlike Kaliningrad. They are mostly honey-colored, while ours range from honey to lemon, cherry, pomegranate. A variety of shades and colors are highly valued in the jewelry industry.
In confirmation of the words of the senior geologist, the representative of the investor Vladimir Mayuk took amber and shone it with a flashlight:
“Our stone is very dense. Kaliningrad - transparent. We have no cracks, chips and completely translucent. Look what color. We have a dark color, garnet, there is even a white patch. The stone has its own characteristics. It is more colorful - more suitable for jewelry.
In Belarus, amber deposits are not primary, but Quaternary, emphasizes Aleksey Anisko. The sun stone was brought to us by glaciers.
- Until now, scientists are arguing where they were brought from: from the territory of modern Ukraine or the Kaliningrad region.
“A variant of using Belarusian amber for the jewelry industry is being developed”
So far, the task of Belarusian specialists is to conduct trial production and determine. to what extent our local manifestations are suitable for such work.
— In order to understand the expediency of extraction, it is necessary to carry out geological exploration in order to understand the extractability of amber from the rock and make an economic and geological assessment. Determine whether you need industrial production or mining in an artel way - that is, to mine deposits in small areas. In addition, you need to understand what kind of amber we have in Belarus - what size, grade, structure it has, - said Oleg Pivovarchik.
All collected material will be submitted to experts for evaluation.
— The tasks of expanding such operations can be carried out when the economic feasibility of production is determined. But even these samples already show that Belarus has valuable raw materials. Now we need to solve the issues of its quality, cost and implementation. And also the problem of creating a unified system in the country that would allow this raw material to be mined and sold,” says the Deputy General Director of Belzarubezhtorg Andrey Kovkhuto.
What is amber, how this solar stone is mined - these are important questions, and even of national importance. Especially for some countries - suppliers of solar stone, where the extraction of amber is regulated by law. Interest at the highest level is due to the profitability of the industry. This is not only a jewelry sphere, the mineral has valuable medical and technical properties.
People have been mining gems since ancient times. And for a very long time the fishery was spontaneous. This continued until the 18th century, until the Teutonic Order introduced monopoly rights to the search and processing of the gem. Thus, the basics of amber production were born, which, although it is carried out in various parts of the world, is concentrated in the Baltic region.
Types of amber deposits
There are many places in the world where amber is mined. Almost all of them are little studied, except for Primorskoye, which is the largest amber deposit in Russia. The nature of the origin of many amber-bearing sites is still unclear. Mineralogists divide them into primary (formed in the once forest area) and secondary (placers).
Of the primary ones today, one can name the Fushunskoye in China, sites in the Far East and the development of amber in Alaska (USA), Canada, and Austria. Large pieces of the mineral have never been found here, so this type of mining site has no industrial importance.
Placers (secondary deposits) differ in that they are removed, and sometimes significantly from the area of their initial occurrence. After all, the mineral is unique in its density (more than 1.0) and buoyancy in water. Therefore, there are accumulations of the gem on the rivers of Alaska, at the foot of the relief in Germany, Russia, on the Dnieper.
The largest placer of the mineral is a deposit from the Baltic to the Curonian Spit, which is located 4-15 m below sea level; amber concentration here is 0.2 kg/m2. During storms, secondary deposits are washed out, and the raging Baltic Sea throws sea amber onto the shores. For example, in Latvia this type of gem production is the basis of the amber industry.
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The reserves of the gem, which lie deep underground, are also considered secondary. This phenomenon is observed in Belarus, in the Gomel and Brest regions. People, digging peat by hand, find a sun stone. This even provoked an "amber fever" among the local population with the consequences of black fishing and illegal use of amber veins.
Modern coastal placers are widespread along the shores of not only the Baltic Sea, but also other seas and oceans (Mediterranean, Black, Arctic Ocean). Some of them contain the mineral "glauconite" in the sedimentary rock, which gives the amber-bearing layers a turquoise hue, from which the name "blue earth" was born.
Such amber deposits are distributed mainly in the Baltic-Dnieper province, stretching from the North Sea through Denmark, Germany, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine to the Black Sea. And among the ways how amber is mined, the technology of washing the blue earth is popular today.
The main world suppliers of gem
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Amber reserves on the planet are usually characterized by three types of gem: Baltic amber, Caribbean and cave amber. The last type is a man-made heritage from a gem, which was inherited from distant crafty ancestors. Archaeological excavations, point finds in ancient caves, decoration and accompaniment of cult burials often become a source of amber items and unique stone samples. The situation is different with the Baltic and Caribbean gems, the “geographical” names themselves speak of their origin.
Baltic amber
This stone, mainly its variety - succinite, comes from the Baltic countries. The industrial scale, which provided the predominant share of the world's mineral reserves (up to 90%), was acquired by its extraction in the Kaliningrad region, in Russia. Since 1947, the specialized JSC Kaliningrad Amber Combine has been operating here, which controls the operation of the largest quarries created on the basis of the oldest deposit in the world - Palmikenskoye.
The names of the Kaliningrad villages Filino, Yantarny, Sinyavino are firmly associated by connoisseurs with the birthplace of the sun stone. The Russian gem of Baltic origin is recognized as the best jewelry amber raw material in terms of size and quality.
Caribbean Amber
It is often referred to as Dominican. This stone is mined in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The Caribbean zone gives the world 300 kg per year. Moreover, the gem was obtained mainly by manual labor.
Dominican amber has its own value, this is the only place in the world where you can find amber with unique inclusions - various reptiles (ancient frogs, lizards), which are perfectly visible through the transparent texture of the mineral. The Baltic gem loses a little here: the fauna of its inclusions is insects. Also, the Dominican stone is blue, quite rare in the amber palette.
These are the main regions and their deposits. Countries less rich in the mineral can supplement the amber map. These are Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Italy (Sicily), USA, Germany, Japan, Canada, Romania, Poland, Myanmar.
From net to hydromechanics: how amber is mined
From the moment the ancient man saw a noticeable golden-honey pebble under his feet, a lot of sea waters washed up on the shores. And with them and amber placers. So people began to understand how to look for amber. Nets appeared in their hands, with which the gem was fished out of the tangle of algae from the depths of the sea. They were replaced by peaks and devices that harrowed the bottom. A floating gem appeared on the surface, and dexterous miners harvested it.
The 17th century is a progressive period in the field of gem mining. The first mines and prototypes of quarries appear. And although these methods turned out to be unprofitable, the basics of industrial production were laid, which was greatly developed in the 20th century. In our time, ways to find amber deposits have a scientific and technical basis. And the process itself is divided into several stages:
- The top layer of soil is cut off with an excavator bucket.
- The removed rock is placed in special separating machines.
- Loose sediments are screened out.
- The remaining stones are sorted by hand, amber is separated from the rest.
But the most advanced method for today is hydromechanical. The upper, “empty” soil layer is dumped by a powerful hydromonitor into the sea, and the subsequent layer containing minerals is immersed in the pipeline and delivered to the processing plant. Further, the procedure for selecting minerals and amber is carried out as described above.
Harvesting the Sun Gem is hard work. But, as the experience of epochs shows, a person is weak before the magic of stones and metal. The amber rush, like the gold rush, continues. And people will look for new ways to discover new amber pantries of nature.
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
