Google celebrates the 204th birthday of Eunice Newton Foote, a scientist known for discovering the Greenhouse effect

Google has paid tribute to Eunice Newton who was an American scientist and women’s rights activist. She is known in the scientific community for her contribution as the first to identify the greenhouse effect and its effect on global warming. Google has created an interactive doodle that takes you to the 11 slides explaining her concepts and achievements on her 204th birthday. Eunice Newton Foote was born on 17th July 1819 in Connecticut and was raised in New York.

She was growing up when social and political movements were on the rise, which shaped her mind and thoughts. She attended Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School from age seventeen to nineteen gaining education in scientific theory and practice. Her experiment in 1856 shaped the understanding of climate change today in which she observed that CO2 and water vapor heated more in comparison to other gases and even took a long to cool down.

When the Sun’s radiative energy reaches Earth a certain amount of radiation is reemitted as infrared radiation while some heat gets absorbed by gases like CO2. These gases reflect heat back thus creating a greenhouse effect. With passing days the amount of these gases is increasing on Earth which means a rise in extreme temperatures all across the globe.

Eunice’s work could not get the popularity it deserved and was ignored for 100 long years before being rediscovered by women academics in the twentieth century. The Eunice Newton Foote Medal for Earth Life Science is in her honor and celebrates her contribution as a scientist who gave outstanding scientific research.