Earth’s Atmosphere – Painted Basketball Analogy.

I want to explain and show you just how thin our atmosphere actually is.

The radius of Earth is 6400km, 99.9% of the material in our atmosphere is below 36km. This means that our atmosphere is a very thin layer in comparison to the size of the Earth. The Earth is roughly 177 times “thicker” than the atmosphere surrounding it. A good analogy to represent this can be shown by a basketball covered in a single layer of paint. The basketball symbolises the Earth and the layer of paint represents the atmosphere. From this analogy you can see how thin the atmosphere really is compared to the size of the Earth.

This is why early astronauts described our atmosphere as the “thin blue line”.