Amber Laine

• Features honey color Baltic amber
• Sterling silver clasp and crimp beads
• Memory wires
• 10 layers
• Necklace measures 16" long with 2" drop of the layers
• Beads measure from about 5/16" to 1/8" in size
• Typically ships the next business day

Do you know how they extract amber from the earth? Well, in some places of the world the earth does most of the work for us. The Baltic Sea is constantly providing the surrounding areas with a steady supply of amber that erodes from the sea floor, floats to the surface, and gets carried to land by the water currents. The modern city of Kaliningrad, Russia is the world leader in term of exporting raw and polished amber. Some people believe that there is still a large deposit of untapped amber in these areas. There have been reports that claim that perhaps as much as 90% of the world's total amber supply is still trapped underground in the coastal regions of Kaliningrad Oblast in Russia near the Baltic Sea. Mining in this area has historically been kept to a minimal level because of the abundance of amber above ground. Today, however, with surface amber becoming more scarce, the market demands for amber, and the region's emerging post-soviet economy, the threat of large amber mines is realistic. The Kaliningrad Amber Mining Plant has already come under scrutiny for supposedly dumping waste from their mine into the same Baltic Sea that other amber collectors depend on. In 2006 alone this plant extracted approximately 134 tons of amber from the earth. There is also amber in other parts of the world. Here, people must mine for the amber by constructing a sort of open-pit or strip-mine operation. In the Dominican Republic people construct tunnels to mine for a unique type of amber that they call "blue amber". This method is extremely dangerous due to the possibility of tunnel collapse. Here at Amber Laine we do not sell any Dominican amber, we only deal in authentic Baltic amber.