On New Year's Eve 2022, Russia launched its rockets against the Taras Shevchenko National University in kyiv, the largest in Ukraine. The explosions blew up the windows of several buildings, including the laboratory of geologist Natalia Gerasimenko. There were no injuries, but no one could remedy the fact that the pollen released by flowers and plants thousands or millions of years ago spread everywhere and was lost forever.
“Recent times have been very difficult,” explains the scientist from kyiv, where she was born 70 years ago, in a teleconference conversation. Neither her perfectly combed hair, nor her impeccable yellow sweater, nor her relaxed smile give away that she is speaking from a country that has been at war for more than two years. “Thanks to Western countries we have the Patriot system in kyiv and many fewer projectiles fall. Even so, anti-aircraft alarms are very frequent. Sometimes they jump in the middle of class and students have to run to the bomb shelters. It is not pleasant, but we survive,” she adds.
Raised and educated in the Soviet Union, Gerasimenko decided to become a geologist against the advice of her parents, both forestry engineers, who saw little future in that profession. In those days she could not travel abroad, but in her first years of university her professors were very well connected and received visits from some of the most interesting researchers of the time. Among them was George Kukla, a geologist born in Czechoslovakia and emigrated to the United States who was one of the first to demonstrate that, during the last million years, the Earth and all the creatures that inhabited it lived at the mercy of climatic cycles that every 100,000 years covered much of Europe and America with impenetrable glaciers. Between cycle and cycle, a window of climatic bonanza allowed the flourishing of life and the first migrations of the human race.
Pollen is an exceptional marker to investigate these periods. After the 2022 bombing, it was essential to prevent the volatile sex cells of the current plants from sneaking into the building and contaminating the few samples that had survived the attack, Gerasimenko recalls. His small victory in this war, and that of his students, is that the laboratory is now completely shored up and has been working again since May.
A few days ago, Gerasimenko was one of the authors of the discovery of the oldest human traces in Europe: stone tools carved by Standing man 1.4 million years ago in western Ukraine. Gerasimenko's work dating sediments and reconstructing past ecosystems was an important contribution to the discovery, published in the journal Naturea reference for the best world science.
This triumph for Ukrainian science was published almost simultaneously with the most detailed report to date on the impact of the war on the country's scientific system. The economic losses amount to about 1.2 billion euros, according to the study, published by the United Nations. Thousands of buildings have been destroyed or damaged and workers at 18 universities and research centers have been evacuated to the west because they are too close to the front or have been taken over by the Russians. This is the case of the Nuclear Power Plant Safety Institute, located in Chernobyl, and which was occupied by Putin's troops in March 2022. The entire surveillance system of the Ukrainian nuclear industry, including the Zaporiya plant, has been stolen or destroyed by the Russians. The loss of this equipment can endanger the health of “more than 2,000 people in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia,” the report highlights. According to the work, 208 members of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine enlisted in the army and eleven have died in combat. Some 5,500 Ukrainian researchers have left the country to work in other countries, mainly Germany and Poland. Spain hosts 58 academics.
A few days after the Russian invasion, on February 24, 2022, Gerasimenko fled to the south of the country. He spent a few months there until his university helped him leave Ukraine. “There was a lot of solidarity. Universities from Sweden, Poland, Germany, Romania and Italy invited me. Finally, I went to La Sapienza University, in Rome. But after a few months it was time to return to my country; especially because my daughter (46 years old) and my granddaughter (16 years old) also did it.” His 55-year-old son-in-law could not leave the country due to martial law. After the stabilization of the front and the relative return to normality, the university forced classes to resume. Anyone who did not want to return to in-person work would lose their job, says Gerasimenko, who now teaches classes every day for undergraduate and graduate students and directs eight doctoral theses.
“My job is to study the past to understand the present and predict the future,” summarizes Gerasimenko, an expert in paleogeography and geoarchaeology. “One of the things we see is that all past cultures depended a lot on nature. 7,000 years ago, for example, in the Neolithic, pollen shows us that the planet's climate became very benign. But about 2,000 years later it got worse and these proto-civilizations disappeared from Ukraine. Thanks to this science we can see all these connections. It is very interesting and important,” she adds.
In Ukraine there are many sites to which researchers have not been able to return. Some are mined and others are too close to the front. The one that worries Gerasimenko the most is near Konstantinovka, in the east of the country and a few kilometers from the front. Real tragedies have been experienced there, such as the bombing of a market that left 16 dead. In 2017, paleontologist Alexander Filippov discovered near this locality the almost complete skeleton of a mammoth and, in more superficial strata, stone tools made by humans.
It is an exceptional find, since it is possibly a Southern mammoth who lived between 1.8 million years and 700,000 years ago, explains the scientist. The tools are about 500,000 years old. The presence in eastern Ukraine of an animal characteristic of warmer climates than the current one, and the subsequent appearance of humans, shows that there could have been one of that window of time in which the enormous glaciers retreated and allowed a few millennia of prosperity. . It is something very similar to what has been seen in Korolevo, the site where the oldest tools in Europe appeared. “These bones are invaluable, unique in all of eastern Ukraine. They must be excavated very carefully and following strict paleontological procedures,” something impossible at the moment, explains Gerasimenko.
Last Friday, the geologist was able to speak with her colleague, archaeologist Yuri Koval, who worked in the area. Her entire apartment has been moved to Lviv and he and his wife and her few-month-old son have been evacuated to a safer place. Together with Filippov, Koval has covered the excavation with earth to protect it from the bombs, but the shells are constantly falling, “sometimes less than 10 meters.”
If the worst happens, scientists have an ace up their sleeve. “Before covering the site, Koval extracted the mammoth's teeth and took them to Lviv,” explains Gerasimenko. “They still preserve the enamel, making them the best sample to do a good geochemical dating or even extract DNA. In fact, before the war started we were planning to invite international experts to do that work,” he adds.
Gerasimenko has blind faith that one day he will be able to return to the project. “I am convinced that this war will end with the victory of Ukraine. When? Don't know. Russia is a monster with many resources; but we will win. And I have no intention of retiring. I love my job”.
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