Scientists

Svante Arrhenius

SVAHN-tuh ah-RAY-nee-us

Physical Chemist

Citation Formats

General Reference

Earth and Environment Atlas. "Svante Arrhenius." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-earth.interactiveatlas.org/scientists/svante-arrhenius.

APA Style

Earth and Environment Atlas. (n.d.). Svante Arrhenius. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-earth.interactiveatlas.org/scientists/svante-arrhenius

BibTeX

@misc{earthandenvironmentatlas-svante-arrhenius,
  author = {Earth and Environment Atlas},
  title = {Svante Arrhenius},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-earth.interactiveatlas.org/scientists/svante-arrhenius},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

A Swedish physical chemist who, wondering what caused the ice ages, spent a year of hand calculation working out how carbon dioxide levels set the planet's temperature, publishing in 1896 the first quantitative version of the greenhouse effect. His estimate of the warming from doubled carbon dioxide sits remarkably near the modern range, though he guessed the change would take millennia rather than a century.

Facts

Birth Date

1859-02-19 1

Birth Year

1859 1

Death Date

1927-10-02 1

Death Year

1927 1

Birthplace

Wik Castle, near Uppsala, Sweden 1

Nationality

Swedish 1

Defining Contribution

In 1896 published the first quantitative calculation of how changing atmospheric carbon dioxide changes Earth's surface temperature, the founding computation of greenhouse climate science; won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the theory of electrolytic dissociation. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Anticipated By

Eunice Newton Foote

Foote's 1856 experiments anticipated the carbon dioxide warming Arrhenius quantified in 1896; no line of influence is documented, and her priority was recognized only on the paper's modern rediscovery.

Source Eunice Newton Foote (Wikipedia)