KALININGRAD, September 24. /TASS/. The Kaliningrad Amber Factory, a subsidiary of Rostec located in Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, has excavated a unique amber nugget weighing more than 2 kg, the factory’s press secretary Anastasia Aksyonova told TASS on Monday.
She said the starting price of the amber stone at an auction might fetch 1.7 mln rubles ($25,825).
"This is a large, light-yellowish, dim, ball-like nugget weighing 2,040 grams," Aksyonova said. "It measures 155 mm by 130 mm by 120 mm and per initial assessments we see a possible starting price of 1.7 mln rubles."
The factory dug up a previous record-setting large stone just three days ago, on September 21, weighing 1.8 kg.
The enterprise has been lucky in finding huge amber nuggets in recent years. It produced 14 giant stones each weighing over 1 kg in 2016 and 19 such stones, in 2017.
Moreover, last year that the factory excavated a nugget weighing around 3 kg.
The Kaliningrad factory is the world’s largest producer of amber. Its main mining area is located near the township of Yantarny [known as Palmniken when the region was part of East Prussia].
Experts say the Yantarny deposit contains more than 110,000 tonnes of amber or about 90% of the global reserves of the semiprecious stone, which is about 50 mln years old.