The key to primeval times is somewhat reminiscent of a heart. But the 150-million-year-old coral is not red, but beige. She doesn’t breathe oxygen either, she breathes history. Concentrated, Wolfgang Kießling, 56, ascetic type, piercing eyes, runs his fingers along her lines. Then he looks up. “This coral,” he says, “wants to tell us something.”
A February afternoon at the Erlangen Institute for Palaeontology Friedrich Alexander University (FAU). The office of Germany’s most influential paleontologist is a room for prehistoric research: fossils on the shelf, a microscope on the desk, a framed Archeopteryx on the wall.
It’s the realm of a man engaged in scientific issues that seem to many to be more of a niche hobby. Which corals lived in Indonesia millions of years ago? How did the plankton fare in the Paleozoic? How much carbonate did reefs produce in the Late Miocene? Topics that Kießling can talk about, gesticulating at length. But what is the point of all this?
In corals like this Kiessling reads like in a book. How is the texture? Where did she show up? What was the climate like back then? And what does that say about today’s reefs’ chances of surviving global warming?
(Photo: Sebastian Teichert)
Kiessling turns the coral in his hands. It was lifted out of the ground less than 200 kilometers south-west of Erlangen, just across the Bavarian border. In the Swabian Alb, where there was still a tropical sea in the Jurassic period. There, reefs with corals like “Thecosmilia trichotoma” obviously feel at home. Later, this was no longer the case: During the interglacial period, corals like this one migrated south and only returned when it got warmer. “If we know what was gone and when,” says Kießling, “then we can estimate the consequences of climate change much better.”
He chooses his words very carefully this afternoon. Because it is not uncommon for science to be highly political. This is also the case these days, when he and 270 colleagues from all over the world gather the concentrated knowledge about the state of the world and put it into words. More heat waves, more heavy rain, more climate refugees: the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are mostly bad news that receive a lot of attention.
Before that, thousands of studies have to be rummaged through – and a political tug-of-war over formulations. How much will sea levels rise by 2100? Is it “virtually certain” that man-made climate change is behind the retreat of Greenland’s ice sheet – or just likely? Kießling belongs to Working Group II, three of its members come from Bavaria. He doesn’t want to go into detail about his work, it’s all top secret. All he says is, “We’re seeing for the first time species going extinct due to climate change.”
Wolfgang Kießling in the archive of the Geozentrum Nordbayern.
(Photo: Sven Stolzenwald/Volkswagen Foundation)
So what?, you could say now. Will the people survive? Climate change has always existed. Or not? Kießling then no longer effervesces, but speaks slowly and carefully. It dates back 250 million years to the worst mass extinction event in Earth’s history. Back then, when millions of cubic kilometers of magma flooded the earth’s surface from volcanoes in today’s Siberia, the earth warmed up by ten degrees, 90 percent of all species died out and it took five million years for the earth to recover to any extent. “Even then,” he then says, “climate change had devastating effects.”
These have long been felt in Bavaria. The climate in the Free State is becoming warmer and more extreme. The glaciers are melting, the forests are drying up, the heavy rain is increasing. While migratory birds stay right here in the winter, mushrooms that previously only existed in the south are popping up in the forests, and cities are having to be more careful about what to plant. Kießling says that “we have to adapt to such changes”.
He probably never would have thought that one day he would become one of the foremost in his field. More than three decades ago, he appeared in his first lecture at FAU, “late, as always,” he says. But in a leather jacket and the certainty that, like many other geologists at the time, he would make it somewhere as an oil driller. But in the lecture hall it was not about money, but about green algae. How they look, what they produce. Kiessling was blown away. From then on he walked the world differently, read stones like a book and traveled the world.
At that time, work with fossils was at a crossroads. Here are those who, like the pioneers from the colonial era, analyzed the nature of primeval snails in the quiet little room. There those who tried to collect large data sets and read global trends from them. Kiessling also wanted to think bigger.
The samples are ground and evaluated in the grinding workshop of the Geozentrum Nordbayern. Kießling itself can hardly be found here anymore. He has specialized in evaluating large data sets.
(Photo: Sven Stolzenwald/Volkswagen Foundation)
He went to Chicago, learned to program and brought the paleontological revolution to Germany. “Without him, this would not exist here,” says the Vice President of the Paleontological Society, Alexander Nützel. “He’s way ahead of his time,” says Dieter Korn, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. “It’s not enough to be fascinated by a stone,” says Kiessling.
In the north of Erlangen he now goes behind his desk, clicks away the meeting chat with the IPCC colleagues who are already sitting in the next preliminary meeting and downloads a table. Age of the reef, size, location, condition, location, water depth, organisms – it’s the survey of primeval reefs in history. Then he opens a chart with jagged curves, up, down, a chronology of the disappearance and reappearance of the riffs. It shows that if it gets too warm, the reefs migrate to where it is cooler – and with them food sources, coastal protection and tourism. “Then that’s it,” says Kiessling.
In Chicago, Kießling learned to evaluate large amounts of data and draw conclusions from them. “It’s a great way to advance the subject,” he says.
(Photo: Sebastian Teichert)
In the scene, he is seen as a charismatic and controversial as well as busy daredevil and accomplished data juggler. Someone who asks the right questions, always wants to be involved and who, with his statistical approach, has made the Erlangen institute a figurehead in his field. A stronghold in the narrow valley, if you will: because the State Office for Statistics counted just 19 paleontology students in Bavaria, 67 study it together with geology. A small subject, with Kiessling as the foremost advocate. No other German paleontologist is cited as often as he is, ranking eleventh worldwide.
In other fields he would be a superstar. But in paleontology, many are often happy if another chair isn’t lost. The Volkswagen Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in Germany, supports his work. This is also a dilemma: Researchers fly around the world to collect fossils, better assess the consequences of climate change and thus protect the earth. He, too, is divided, says Kießling. But it’s like this: “Only when I know the beauty of the world do I also know what I’m actually protecting if I behave better.”
He now takes a stone with a fish head from his shelf. It comes from the nearby Altmühltal, a veritable treasure trove of fossil sites. More than 900 petrified plant and animal species have already been discovered there, from a time of around 150 million years ago. Kiessling turns the stone, then puts it down again. “A single fish doesn’t tell us much,” he says. What he means: A lot of fish then a lot more.
He’s bouncing on the spot. The next meeting with colleagues is already underway. As one of the main authors of the working group that takes care of impacts, adaptations and vulnerabilities, he cannot be missing. Especially since time is pressing. The report is due to appear this Monday, and there is still work to be done. Are we doomed? He smiles, shakes his head. People, he says, will adapt. “You can’t get rid of it that quickly.” If things continue like this, the only question is how worth living is the life that then remains.