Dear students,

Dear staff and students

On Friday November 22nd at 16:00 , Dr. Frits Hilgen, associate professor at the department of Physical Geography will give his retirement FEST in VJ Koningsberger-PANGEA.

Frits Hilgen: 40 years Milankovitch: A personal story and way of life
Can you spend your entire working career of ~40 years on the fascinating narrative of astronomical (Milankovitch) climate forcing? On how the gravitational influence of the Sun, planets, satellites and asteroids affected Earth’s climate, and how this influence can be almost perfectly recorded in our stunning sedimentary archives and what you can all reconstruct from these archives? Well, at the end, I would say yes, you can! However, during this “farewell” talk, I will not spend that much time on the cycles and the science itself. If you want to hear that part of the story, you better go to the preceding symposium where former PhDs will provide you with a superb overview of that 40 years of history interspersed with, I am afraid some anecdotes.

In my talk I will look back at my personal story of how I decided to study Earth Sciences, to how I completely changed the subject of my PhD thesis, and finally ended up as cyclostratigrapher, or better integrated stratigrapher, spending approximately 9 years of my life in the field, including all the fieldworks with students. Where can you better learn the Earth Sciences than during your 1st year “mapping” exercise, being thrown in the depth, taking arduous decisions about what data to collect and at the end of the day write a mission statement in your fieldbook, not only about WHAT you are going to do in the field the next day but especially WHY? In short, an excellent scientific training! At the end of my talk, I will look shortly at a hopefully bright future “not sitting behind the geraniums” but continue to work with young and motivated PhDs, write with a bit of luck some interesting papers that you can only write in the later part of your career, like what would have happened if Earth’s orbit would have been circular, but also have more time for hobbies as birding and drawing. Hope to see you all!!!

Drinks will be provided afterwards.
Hope to see many of you at the FEST!

Best wishes,
The FEST committee
Barbara, Rosa, Johanna, Niklas, and Frenk