How many miles thick is the atmosphere?

Brainy Blonde

The Troposhere is 14 km or 8.699 miles thick. The Tropopause is 4 km or 2.485 miles thick. The Stratosphere, including the ozone layer, is 32 km or 19.88 miles thick. The Mesosphere is 40 km or 24.85 miles thick. The Ionosphere (Aurora) is 310 km or 192.6 miles thick. The total thickness of earth's atmosphere is 400 km or 248.514 miles thick. All answers given in the research were metric measurments. Since the question asked for an answer in imperial measurements, I used a simple conversion table on-line, and gave the exact conversions. Although, I myself prefer the imperial system because that is what I grew up with, most sciences always use the metric system. May 29 01, 4:11 AM

gmackematix

An altitude of 62 miles is traditionally taken as the boundary between the atmosphere and space although, in reality, there is no hard cut-off point. There is, instead, a gradual rarefaction of the atmosphere as one goes higher. Nov 15 04, 8:46 PM

KiwiGal13

Everything I've read has said that 99% of the atmosphere is below 30km and 99.9999% is below 100km. http://pumas.jpl.nasa.gov/MSWord_Examples/01_06_97_1.doc [Added reference link - McG] May 25 08, 5:23 PM

queproblema

The last entry on this page shows that most of the MASS of the atmosphere is below 30 km, but Brainy Blonde correctly reported the approximate assigned levels of the various layers of the atmosphere. As Gmack said, it gets more and more rarefied (has less and less mass) as one goes "up." http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/LouiseLiu.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere May 25 08, 6:37 PM

McGruff

62 miles above the earth is generally accepted as being the beginning of space, although that is not the same as saying the earth's atmosphere is 62 miles thick. Why does space officially begin 62 miles above the Earth? Sept. 30, 2004 Because 62 miles is about 100 kilometers, and 100 kilometers is the figure used by the World Air Sports Federation (FAI), the organization that maintains the aeronautical record book and keeps track of achievements in flying. In the mid-1950s the federation, knowing many aeronautic records would be blown away by the coming space age, wanted to declare a point at which aeronautics ended and astronautics began. An informal group of aeronautics researchers led by Hungarian Theodore Von Karman tried to predict the altitude below which significant lateral thrust would be required to keep a craft flying level. The group speculated that this would happen somewhere around 100 kilometers, so Von Karman suggested the federation just use that nice round number everyone could agree upon. The 100-kilometer standard, sometimes called the Karman Line, has since been adopted by many agencies and organizations worldwide. The National Aeronautics and Space Act, which created NASA in 1958, simply defines space as "outside Earth's atmosphere." But it's tricky to pinpoint where the Earth's atmosphere ends. NASA could use a figure as lofty as 600 kilometers, the outer limit of the upper atmosphere, or thermosphere, or it could say space begins 50 kilometers up, at the top of the stratosphere, below which one finds 99 percent of the air in the atmosphere. But when determining who is an astronaut, NASA uses the FAI's 100-kilometer figure. The U.S. Air Force, however, awards astronaut wings to rated officers who fly higher than 50 miles (or about 80 kilometers) above sea level. http://www.slate.com/id/2107381/ May 25 08, 10:08 PM

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