Short answers, pulled from the story.
Strabo was a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian who lived from around 64 BC to approximately 24 AD. He is best known for the Geographica, an encyclopaedic work describing peoples and places across Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Central Asia during the reign of Augustus, and the only surviving ancient text to cover both Greek and Roman worlds in that era.
A first edition of the Geographica appeared around 7 BC, with a final edition completed no later than 23 AD. The work first reached Western Europe as a Latin translation around 1469, the first printed edition was published in Venice in 1516, and the scholar Isaac Casaubon produced the first critical edition in 1587.
Strabo travelled extensively across the ancient world. He journeyed as far west as the coastal region of Tuscany, as far south as the borders of Ethiopia, sailed up the Nile to Philae around 25 BC, and visited the island of Gyaros in the Aegean Sea in 29 BC. He also spent time in Rome from around 44 BC to at least 31 BC and worked in the library at Alexandria.
Strabo proposed that the earth's surface itself rises and subsides, carrying the sea with it, to explain why marine shells are found at great elevations far from the sea. Charles Lyell cited this theory in his Principles of Geology, noting that modern geologists were only beginning to appreciate its depth. Strabo also described volcanism at Katakekaumene and suggested that volcanic vents act as safety valves for underground pressure.
Strabo studied rhetoric under Aristodemus in Nysa, a teacher who was the grandson of Posidonius and whose influence runs throughout the Geography. In Rome he studied philosophy under the Peripatetic Xenarchus, grammar under Tyrannion of Amisus, and Stoic philosophy under Athenodorus Cananites, who was also the tutor of Augustus.
Strabo's first major work was Historical Sketches, known in Greek as Historica hypomnemata, written around 20 BC while he was in Rome. The work was meant to cover the history of the known world from the Roman conquest of Greece onward, but it is almost entirely lost. The only surviving fragment is a piece of papyrus held by the University of Milan.