History and People

Who made the first star map? When did people know that the Earth was round? When were sunspots discovered? The links to the right will lead you to biographies of scientists who lived at different times through history. Discover the people who made science history!

Eratosthenes was a Greek scientist who lived from 276 to 194 B.C. He studied astronomy, geography, and math. Eratosthenes is famous for making the first good measurement of the size of the Earth. This portrait, drawn long after he was dead, shows what the artist thought he might have looked like.

Although we humans have never experienced fast global warming, our planet has. And our planet keeps records of what happened. The oldest records that the Earth keeps are in its rocks. In this image, geologists Chris von der Borch and Dave Mrofka collect sediment samples in South Australia. These rocks hold clues to help explain why climate changed abruptly 635 million years ago.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a British astronomer who was born in 1943. She discovered pulsars - stars which emit periodic radio waves - in 1967. Burnell was a graduate student at Cambridge University when she discovered pulsars. Her professor, Antony Hewish, received the Nobel Prize in

Dione Rossiter is a scientist that participated in a research expedition to understand the climate of the southeastern Pacific in fall, 2008 - the VOCALS campaign. She got to fly a her scientific instrument aboard a research aircraft above a layer of stratocumulus cloud that seemed to go on forever.

Science educators on a research immersion experience with the Antarctic Geological Drilling Project (ANDRILL) sent postcards to Windows to the Universe while they were in Antarctica from October 2007 until January 2008. The team drilled into sedimentary rocks below the ice of the Ross ice shelf to help learn more about the environmental changes that have affected the continent in the past. This image shows what life is like in a field camp on the ice