Eunice Newton Foote, the scientist who first studied the greenhouse effect

204 years after her birth, Google celebrates with a doodle the American scientist who was the first to focus on thegreenhouse effectwhich is when gases such as carbon dioxide trap heat from the sun causing a gradual increase in the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere.

Born in 1819 in Connecticut, Eunice Newton Foote studied at Troy Female Seminary majoring in science and chemistry. In 1848 Foote attended the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, a document calling for women’s equality in social and legal status.

At a time when women were largely excluded from the scientific community, Foote was able to carry out the experiments that made it possible to establish a link between rising carbon dioxide levels and warming of the atmosphere. This study and his second on static electricity to appear in the journal Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science they were the first two published physics studies by a woman in the United States. If scientists can still investigate the consequences of the current climate crisis today, we owe it to her, a scientist and activist for women’s rights.