A clickable cross-section of Earth’s air — five named layers, approximate heights, and what each region does for weather, life, and orbit. Pair with the science status desk, the astronomy solar-system map, live weather, the clean-air / natural-life themes on Power, light pollution literacy, and the Salesforce Tower / Day for Night essay — scatter is why a distant crown becomes regional glow. Which bands reach the ground versus need space telescopes is an atmospheric-window story on the electromagnetic-spectrum desk. The molecules here sit on a deeper stack: quarks, leptons, and three forces. The column stays on the planet because of gravity. How much of that column a line of sight crosses, and how the lowest air lifts the horizon, is the airmass desk.
Interactive · Layers
Tap a band · compressed height scale
Heights are approximate average values. Tropopause height varies with latitude (~8–18 km). Vertical scale is compressed (not linear) so the thin upper layers remain visible.
Useful reference altitudes
Sea level — 0 km · baseline for pressure and standard atmosphere tables.
Typical commercial flight — ~10–12 km (~33,000–39,000 ft), still inside the troposphere / near the tropopause.
Ozone layer (peak density) — roughly 15–35 km in the lower–middle stratosphere (varies).
International Space Station — ~400 km average, in the thermosphere.
Kármán line (convention) — 100 km, often cited as the edge of space (still within the thermosphere in this scheme).
Educational schematic from public-knowledge altitudes (standard atmosphere / textbook averages). Boundaries are gradual, not walls. Not a forecast model — for live surface weather see /weather/. Credit: public domain science literacy; no proprietary data.