Miles of air cover Earth. The boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space, the Kármán line, is about 62 miles (100 kilometers) a

Why aren't we crushed by the weight of Earth's atmosphere?

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2024-11-24 16:00:17

Miles of air cover Earth. The boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space, the Kármán line, is about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the planet's surface. However, about 99.9% of the mass of Earth's atmosphere lies below a height of 30 miles (48 km), according to Anthony Broccoli, a professor of atmospheric science at Rutgers University.

Air is lighter than our bodies, but all those miles of air in the atmosphere amount to a lot of weight. "The total mass of Earth's atmosphere is 5.1 billion billion kilograms, or 11.24 billion billion pounds," Broccoli told Live Science. When it comes to a cylindrical column of air that is 1 foot (0.3 meters) in diameter, "its mass is 1,663 pounds [754 kilograms]," he said.

In part, it comes down to the distribution of the pressure. Air flows around your body. Ultimately, the pressure from air "is exerted uniformly on all parts of a person's body — it is not just a downward force," Broccoli said.

Still, the pressure the atmosphere exerts uniformly on our bodies is not trivial. It amounts to approximately 14.7 pounds — about the weight of a large bowling ball — per square inch (1 kilogram per square centimeter), Broccoli noted.