Earth's atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding the planet Earth and retained by the Earth's gravity.
It contains roughly 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen 0.97% argon and carbon dioxide 0.04% trace amounts of other gases, and water vapor.
This mixture of gases is commonly known as air.
The atmosphere protects life on Earth by absorbing ultraviolet solar radiation and reducing temperature extremes between day and night.
The atmosphere has no abrupt cut-off.
It slowly becomes thinner and fades away into space.
There is no definite boundary between the atmosphere and outer space.
Three-quarters of the atmosphere's mass is within 11 km of the planetary surface...
For more information about the topic Earth's atmosphere, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
Planetary boundary layer The planetary boundary layer (PBL) is also known as the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). It is the lowest part of the atmosphere and its behavior is ... >
read more
Altitude Altitude is the elevation of an object from a known level or datum. Common datums are mean sea level and the surface of the WGS-84 geoid, used by ... >
read more
Solar radiation Solar radiation is radiant energy emitted by the sun, particularly electromagnetic energy. About half of the radiation is in the visible short-wave ... >
read more
Inversion (meteorology) A temperature inversion is a meteorological phenomenon in which air temperature increases with height for some distance above the ground, as opposed ... >
read more
Note: This page refers to an article that is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the article Earth's atmosphere at Wikipedia.org. See the Wikipedia copyright page for more details.