yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

This Russian City is the Amber Capital of the World | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

On beaches like this one outside of Kaliningrad, precious gemstone amber is so plentiful you might simply find it washed up in the sand. Amber is actually fossilized tree sap that's 50 million years old. Ninety percent of the world's supply of amber comes from right here in Kaliningrad. Amber is big business, mined in massive quarries using pressurized water. The most valuable pieces are first sorted by size, then polished with wooden cubes and huge rotating machines to remove impurities, shaped by hands using powerful saws, and then prepared for manufacture to ship out to artisans and jewelers all around the world.

The best of their work over the past centuries is housed here at the city's Amber Museum. Have attitudes towards amber changed in recent times? People started to assemble in Russia in the 10th century; it was as precious as gold. But the attitude is changing because before, the attitude was like, "Oh, it's a stone of my grandmother," because it was very popular in the '60s. But now even local young people who are wearing jewelry sleight of hand to see some of these new styles.

I decided to pay a visit to a local jewelry designer who specialized in making customized new designs for the next generation. They really are cutting-edge. They use 3D modeling to create a design, then use wax models to create plaster casts filled with molten silver. Amber pieces are sorted by exact shades of color, polished to a brilliant shine, and then laser soldered into place. It really was quite impressive.

So, when you come to the amber capital of the world, you know exactly what to bring home as a souvenir. It's the perfect gift for someone you love. [Music]

More Articles

View All
How Not to Be Pathetic | Stoic Philosophy & Emotions
English speakers often use the term “pathetic” in a derogatory manner, which characterizes weakness and helplessness in other people. Hence, most people don’t want to be pathetic, and we generally don’t like pathetic people. But what makes a person pathet…
The View From Above | Stoic Exercises For Inner Peace
It’s funny to look at ourselves and see how we quarrel about the smallest things. Like the behavior of an annoying coworker during a meeting or the person who cuts us off in traffic. From my own experience, it’s very easy to get dragged along by a minor e…
Why I Think the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election will be the Most Important in our Lifetime
Let’s do politics quickly. We have an election next year in the US that you’ve said is the most important election in our lifetime. You see populists on both sides of the debate. How do you—what’s the end result there? Well, I think we can all see that w…
The Most Persistent Myth
This will revolutionize education. No prediction has been made as often or as incorrectly as that one in 1922. It was Thomas Edison who declared that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will su…
TikTok Is More Dangerous Than We Thought
Tick Tock is far more dangerous than we thought. In the past two years, at least 15 kids age 12 or younger, across the globe, from Milwaukee to Sicily, have painfully passed on after attempting what seemed to them like harmless challenges they found on th…
Be Too Busy to “Do Coffee”
We squander our time with the death of a thousand cuts. So another tweet ahead was, “You should be too busy to do coffee while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.” People who know me know that I’m famous for simultaneously doing two things. One is havi…