This page is all about answering the question: "How thick is the atmosphere?". The question doesn't actually have a simple answer, because there is no place where the atmosphere suddenly stops and space starts. Instead, the air gets progressively thinner and thinner as you get higher, gradually giving way to the vacuum of space. What can be startling is how quickly the air gets thinner as you travel upwards. On this page I'll be finding some ways of getting to grips with the scale of the atmosphere.
At the end, I hope that you might agree with me that the atmosphere is really awfully thin, and that we definitely ought to be looking after it much more carefully than we do at the moment.
What do we mean by "the air gets thinner"?
A cubic metre of air at sea level contains about 1.2 kilograms of air. Higher in the atmosphere, a cubic metre would contain less air. For example, at 9,000 metres (the summit of Mount Everest) a cubic metre of air would contain only about 0.47 kilograms of air, less than half as much as at sea level. It is this decrease of mass per unit volume (density) that I mean when I write of the air getting "thinner".
How high is the top of the atmosphere?
To get a feel for the thicknessof the atmosphere, we will look at a number of different definitions of the top of the atmosphere. As well as these, we'll also look at some altitudes with life-and-death significance. Please note that the altitudes in the headings do not relate to the altitude scale in the picture on the left (of which more later).
120 km - the re-entry line
Below an altitude of 120km, atmospheric effects become noticeable for spacecraft on re-entry.
100 km - the Karman line
The Karman line is a common definition of the boundary of space. It represents the approximate altitude at which an aeroplane would need to fly so fast to stay up in the thin air that it would be going fast enough to be in orbit anyway. The Karman line is where an aeronaut becomes an astronaut. The picture on the right is a scale diagram showing the Earth (grey) and the atmosphere (blue, thickness defined by the Karman line). 99.99997% of the atmosphere lies in the blue region. More about the Karman line.
31 km - the 99% line
99% of the atmosphere is below 31 km above the surface of the Earth. The picture on the right shows roughly what part of central London would look like seen from 31km. It doesn't look too far away, but you are looking through nearly the entire atmosphere. More about the 99% line.
19 km - the Armstrong line
At this altitude the pressure is lower than the vapour pressure of the water in your body. Your body fluids would start boiling at this altitude, though you'd die of hypoxia first.
About 11km - the pressure-suit line
Above this altitude, a simple oxygen supply is not enough to keep you alive. Aircraft cabins have to be pressurised, or you need to wear a pressure suit.
8 km - top of the constant-density atmosphere
Another way to think about the thickness of the atmosphere is to ask "How much air are we looking through when we look upwards through the atmosphere?". To answer this question, imagine that the air in the Earth's atmosphere is all the same density, instead of getting thinner and thinner with altitude. With the same total amount of air as in the traditional atmosphere, this imaginary atmosphere will come to an abrupt end at a certain altitude. How thick would this constant-density atmosphere be?
The answer is: a little more than 8 kilometres. Mount Everest would just poke out of the top of it.
Looked at in this way, the atmosphere is startlingly thin. You can commonly look horizontally from one place to another place 9 or more kilometres away. When you are doing this, there is more air between you and the not-very-distant object than there is between you and a star overhead.
More about the constant-density atmosphere.
All the air in the world
In a similar spirit, Adam Nieman produced the brilliant image on the right. The pink ball represents all the air in the world, gathered into a sphere at sea-level density. Not much of it, is there?
5.5km - the habitation limit
It appears that no amount of acclimatisation will enable you to survive indefinitely above an altitude of around 6 km. Lambert (1971) reports that in 1961 a team that spent six months at 5,800m was less fit at the end of this time than newly-arrived people. He also cites an Andean mine at 5,800m, where the miners chose to walk up daily from 5,300m rather than live at the higher altitude. The current highest known permanent human settlement is La Rinconada, at 5,100m in the Peruvian Andes.
The photograph (above right) shows roughly what Buckingham Palace would look like from 6,000m altitude. It doesn't look very far away, but at this altitude you wouldn't last very long. About 50% of the atmosphere is below the habitation limit.
The habitation line on the map
The photograph (right) shows an ordinary 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey map, familiar to UK hillwalkers. It shows the town of Aberdeen on the Scottish coast. On this scale, the tip of my thumb is at about 6,500m, comfortably in the region where the air is too thin to support human life for very long. If you were on the north side of Aberdeen, you'd be closer to the uninhabitable zone than you would be to the south side of Aberdeen. Seen this way, the atmosphere seems rather thin. 55% of the atmosphere is below the level of the tip of my thumb.
About 3km - the oxygen-mask line
Above this altitude, military pilots are required to use an oxygen supply. Having said that, thousands of people climb 4,000-metre peaks in the Alps and nobody uses oxygen.
12 metres - top of the liquid atmosphere
Finally, suppose we condensed the entire atmosphere to its liquid form. How deep would the resulting "ocean" be? The answer: just under 12 metres.
More about the liquid atmosphere.
So what?
The alarming thing about the altitudes I've listed above is how small they are. Compared to the distances that we regularly travel horizontally across the Earth, these distances are tiny. If you could walk vertically upwards, you'd need an oxygen supply after only an hour. Three hours walking and you'd need a pressure suit. Space itself is only a good day's bike ride away. Living in Central Scotland, I'm closer to space than I am to any part of England.
The tall picture
The tall thin picture above is a representation of the way the atmosphere gets thinner with altitude. The density of blue dots is proportional to air density at each altitude, starting with solid blue at sea level. The tick marks on the right-hand side are at 10km intervals. Note that there is air above 60km, even though there are no dots. It's just that the air there is extremely thin, and the dots are so widely spaced that you'd need a much wider picture to have a chance of spotting one.
The picture lets you see at a glance how much of the atmosphere is below any given altitude. The aeroplane silhouette is at a typical cruising altitude for airliners - see how much of the atmosphere is below you when you fly.
You could walk across the bottom of the picture in less than two hours.
The wide picture
The picture below is drawn on the same principle, but to a different scale. It shows Edinburgh (E), London (L), and the atmosphere. The broken line is the boundary of space (Karman line).
More on...
More on the Karman line
An aeroplane only stays in the sky if it is constantly travelling forwards, so that the wings can generate lift. The thinner the air, the faster the plane has go to generate enough lift to stay up.
An orbiting spacecraft only stays in the sky if it travelling fast enough to keep missing the Earth as gravity tries to pull it down. If it goes any more slowly, it will sooner or later fall back to Earth. The required speed is called orbital velocity, and it varies with the height of the orbit. For a space shuttle in low Earth orbit, the orbital velocity is about 17,000 miles per hour.
Now think about an aeroplane that is trying to fly higher and higher. As the air gets thinner, it has to travel faster and faster to stay up. There comes an altitude where it needs to travel so fast to fly that it is at orbital velocity anyway. At this point you could take away the remaining air altogether and the plane would stay up by virtue of being in orbit. The altitude where the required flying speed is equal to orbital velocity is called the Karman line. It is roughly 100 km from the surface of the Earth; for many purposes (eg the Ansari X-Prize) it marks the boundary of space. Back to the Karman Line.
More on the 99% line
The pressure at any level in the atmosphere must be exactly that required to support the overlying layers of the atmosphere. The pressure at sea level is enough to support the entire weight of the atmosphere. If the pressure at a given altitude is, say, half sea-level pressure, then we know that half of the mass of the atmosphere must be above this level. Therefore with a table of atmospheric pressures we can quickly work out what fraction of the atmosphere is above any given altitude. Back to the 99% line.
More on the constant-density atmosphere
Imagine a column of air, of cross-sectional area 1 square metre, that extends through the full height of the atmosphere. The air pressure at the bottom of this column, at sea level, is very close to 105 newtons per metre squared. This means that all of the air in the column of the atmosphere has a weight W close to 105 newtons. The acceleration due to gravity is, for our purposes, constant throughout the height of the column - let's use g = 9.8 ms-2. The mass is air in the column is given by W divided by g, which comes to 10200 kg. The density of air at sea level is about 1.22 kg m3, and therefore the volume of air in the column is 10200/1.22 = 8360 cubic metres. As the column has a cross-sectional area of 1 square metre, this means its height is 8360 metres. Back to the constant-density atmosphere.
More on the liquid atmosphere
When working out the depth of the constant-density atmosphere, we established that the mass of a column of air of cross-sectional area 1 m2, extending the entire height of the atmosphere, is about 10200 kg. The density of liquid air is about 870 kg m-3, and so if liquefied this amount of air would have a volume of 11.7 m3. Hence if we liquefied the atmosphere, the resulting ocean would be 11.7 m deep. Back to the liquid atmosphere.
Afterthought
You are in the vastness of space. In all directions in front of you, almost empty star-studded space stretches out for unimaginable distances, giving an almost overwhelming feeling of exposure. Behind you is an apparently limitless hard surface. A strange force presses your back firmly against this wall, almost as if it were magnetic. A transparent layer of air between you and the void gives you something to breathe and protects you from the cold of space.
But like most clear nights, it's a chilly one, so after a while you stand up and walk home to warm your toes in front of the fire.
References
Lambert, D. (1971) Medical appendix in Bonington (1971) Annapurna South Face. Cassell.
West, J.B (2002) Highest Permanent Human Habitation. High Altitude Medicine & Biology, 3, 401-407.