Klaus Felix Kaiser before his last flight, July 2012
Excerpt:
Promoting science at and sometimes even beyond its interdisciplinary boundaries requires lots of enthusiasm, vision, creativity and stamina, as well as strong charisma and a sufficient amount of self-confidence. Klaus Felix Kaiser, who unexpectedly died July 20th, 2012, certainly commanded a great quantity of all these characteristics. For more than 35 years of his professional career, he incessantly worked on the development and improvement of tree-ring records from the Late Glacial and Early Holocene periods. His productive life-task consequently resulted in the oldest floating tree-ring chronology from nearly 150 individual pines collected in Switzerland. This annually resolved and millennium-long paleo-environmental archive reaches back to ~14’000cal BP. It remains worldwide unique.
Source: Helle G, Gärtner H, Beck W, Heinrich I, Heußner KU, Müller A, Sanders T (eds.) (2013): TRACE – Tree Rings in Archaeology, Climatology and Ecology, Vol. 11. GFZ Potsdam, Scientific Technical Report STR13/05, Potsdam, p. 6-7.