Sprockholz
Sprockholz is a name for brown wood or, through coalification , black wood and bark residues as well as lignite residues . The material is found in rinsing lines on the coast of the sea. During the former amber dredging in the Danzig Bay and the surrounding area, sprock wood was also brought to light (quasi fossil sprock wood). Due to their rounded shape, the pieces of wood in flushing lines are also called rolling wood. Other - mostly regional - names are coffee thick (for an accumulation of very small particles that are reminiscent of coffee grounds when washed together) or cigars (for larger elongated pieces).
etymology
The name goes back to the Low German adjective sprock , which means something like “brittle”, “crumbly” or “brittle”. For example, regionally in the Low German-speaking area, willows that bend only a little and break quickly are referred to as Sprock willows . Reading Sprock means something like "collect thin branches in the forest".
Sprockwood and Amber
The saprock soaked with seawater has a specific weight that is only slightly higher than that of seawater. As a result, it does not swim in salt water, but is moved by a slight swell . As a result, sprock wood often forms distinctive flushing lines with other materials of the same specific weight (mussel and snail shells, algae, seaweed, pine cones, civilization garbage). Colloquially - albeit somewhat imprecisely - the entire flushing area consisting of such a mixture is sometimes referred to as sprock wood.
If these conspicuously dark rinsing fringes occur on the North Sea coast of Denmark, Germany, locally also the Netherlands and southern England and on the coasts of the southern Baltic Sea, amber is often found in them, with a specific weight of approx. 1.05, which is also just above salt water up to 1.10 is washed up together with the sprock wood and other materials. This material was once referred to as mother amber , a term that is no longer used today.
Ravpindelag
The Danish word Ravpindelag (literally translated as amber twig layer ) also basically refers to a collection of saprock, often mixed with mussel shells, worm tubes and similar objects. Such locations also occur in various tertiary geological formations in Denmark and are often referred to in geological literature with this Danish word. They mark the flushing lines of former seashores and mostly contain - like today's flushing lines - amber.
From the course of these fossil flushing fringes, geologists have been able to draw insights into the course of the coast in geological time periods and their gradual shift. These findings also corroborate the theory that the amber occurrences, especially off the Danish North Sea coast, are not only due to inundation over the glacial glacial valleys , but that the Eocene / Oligocene amber forest must have extended to the south of the Fennoscandan peninsula and the fossil resins of this forest through Rivers were carried in the sea sections to the south of this, where they were deposited and parts of them have been shifted further and further south and south-west over time by sea strangulation and regression .
literature
- Karl Andrée: The amber country and its life. Stuttgart 1951.
- Karl Andrée: Amber and its importance in the natural sciences and humanities, arts and crafts, technology, industry and trade. Koenigsberg 1937.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hermann von Bielke: Amber - an important natural product of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, as well as of the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg and other areas of northern Germany. Hamburg 1845.
- ^ Sven Gisle Larsson: Baltic Amber - a Palaeobiological Study. In: Entomonograph Vol. 1, Klampenborg (DK) 1978, ISBN 87-87491-16-8 .