Nobody is certain which tree made it. Baltic amber is the largest known deposit of fossil plant resin on Earth and the richest repository of fossil insects of any age, and yet the species that bled it has been argued over for two centuries.
A 2009 study by Alexander Wolfe and colleagues put the question to infrared spectroscopy. They compared the chemical fingerprints of the fossil resin against resins from living conifers and concluded that the source was the family Sciadopityaceae, whose only surviving member is Sciadopitys verticillata, the Japanese umbrella pine. That challenges the older candidates, the Araucariaceae and the Pinaceae, and it fits the wider story: those forests were retreating from northern Europe as the climate cooled after the Eocene climate optimum.
The scale is hard to hold. Estimates put the resin output of that forest at more than a hundred thousand tons. The amber itself formed during the Eocene, though exactly when is still disputed, with published figures clustering around forty to forty-seven million years ago. Chemically it carries three to eight per cent succinic acid, which is why it is properly called succinite.
The geology explains why you find it on a beach. The in-place deposit is the Prussian Formation, whose amber-bearing horizon is called the Blue Earth for the green glauconite in it, exposed on the Sambia Peninsula in Kaliningrad. But much of the amber was picked up again by Pleistocene ice and scattered as glacial till across the North European Plain, and the sea keeps sorting it out and throwing it back. Today more than ninety per cent of the world's amber is produced in Kaliningrad, where the state combine took out 250 tonnes in 2014 and 400 in 2015.
Latvia's share is smaller and always was. A survey of the old Courland governorate noted, drily, that a little amber was found on the coast.
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