Apparently the oldest and the easiest method of acquiring amber is collecting it on the beach. During storms, amber stored in the seafloor crust is dumped out on the shore together with a big amount of organic debris, mostly sea algae and pieces of wood, creating bings on the beach called wash margin. Before amber is thrown out on the coast it is rolled for a while in the tact of waving in the shallow offshore water. Then it is possible to collect it straight from the water with devices similar to slight fishnets stretched on the edges and tied to a long stick. Even nowadays amber is acquired in such a way, and in the places where it is dumped out on the shore amber-seekers can be found.
Today the most common way of acquiring amber is a hydraulic-opening method, which lets people seek amber on the south coast of the Baltic Sea, where amber is stored shallowly in a few thousand-year-old beach crust. Thanks to highly-efficient pumps, pipes and hoses a strong stream of water is directed under the surface of the Earth. The water rinses the layers of organic crust stored under the ground, in which there are amber lumps and lifts them towards the surface. The excess of mud and water mixture is directed to a storing net and then all output is rinsed in brine, in that way separating amber from debris.
In the past the most popular mines were shaft ones. Most often these were a few-meter-deep holes in the ground protected with a wooden shuttering. As for lush amber deposits, it also happened that much deeper mines were built going down several dozen shafts and radiate with side tunnels. This type of excavating was mostly dominant deep inland where, thanks to the activity of Scandinavian land, the crust of blue soil containing amber was moved, often in the form of dozen-tons lumps trapped in ice. Today this method is used very rarely, mostly during illegal excavating.
Nowadays the biggest amount of amber is exploited using strip mining. Once such mines were small, but today these are huge amber industrial groups which provide 90% of the total amount of the raw material. The blue soil crust exploited in such a way is transported to a sorting office and rinsed in sieves of various sizes. Amber segregated according to its size is introduced on the market.
In the past, purging and clearing of marine routes and harbour bays were crucial while exploiting amber. The crust lifted from the sea floor by special ships was first sieved in the sea and later repeated on land. The fact that the deposits are not renewable, resulted in the investment being unprofitable and the costs were difficult to recoup, so the method failed. However, occasional deepening of harbour mouths attract amber seekers. Similarly to seeking amber from the sea they are trying to find amber in the mixture of water and sand that gets out of the pipes of a dredger.
