The Baltic amber forest
Resin from a vanished northern European forest becomes the largest amber deposit on Earth.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 10 million years
- Known to
- ± 3 million years
- Era
- Eocene, Cenozoic
Somewhere in Fennoscandia a vast forest produces resin on an extraordinary scale over several million years, and the rivers carry it into the Baltic basin, where it concentrates in the layer miners call blue earth. The deposit holds perhaps 80 per cent of all known amber and tens of thousands of described inclusions — insects, spiders, velvet worms, flowers, feathers, lizards. It documents a temperate-to-subtropical mixed forest with no exact modern equivalent, and it has been traded along European amber routes since the Neolithic.