The mesosphere is 22 miles (35 kilometers) thick. The air is still thin, so you wouldn’t be able to breathe up in the mesosphere. But there is more gas in this layer than there is out in the thermosphere.

Chemicals and the Environment It is the coldest place on Earth and has a temperature on the order of − 85°C (− 120°F). Just below the mesopause, the air is so cold that even the very scarce water vapor at this altitude can be sublimated into polar-mesospheric noctilucent clouds.

The mesosphere is the least known layer of the atmosphere. The mesosphere lies above the highest altitude an airplane can go. If you were in the mesosphere without a space suit, your blood would boil! This is because the pressure is so low that liquids would boil at normal body temperature.

The upper reaches of the atmosphere—the mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere—fade from shades of blue to the blackness of space. The different colors occur because the dominant gases and particles in each layer act as prisms, filtering out certain colors of light.

Mesosphere, altitude and temperature characteristics The top of the mesosphere is the coldest area of the Earth’s atmosphere because temperature may locally decrease to as low as 100 K (-173°C).

100-350 km Soft plastic *note: The mantle is not liquid! The mesosphere is beneath the asthenosphere. It encompasses the lower mantle, where material still flows but at a much slower rate than the asthenosphere. Something that appears to be solid on a short time scale can, in fact, be liquid.

The Earth’s interior is composed of four layers, three solid and one liquid—not magma but molten metal, nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. The deepest layer is a solid iron ball, about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) in diameter. Above the inner core is the outer core, a shell of liquid iron.

One of the most important is the Carbon Cycle since all of the organisms on Earth are carbon-based life forms. includes all water on the surface of the earth oceans, lakes, rivers, aquifers, and ice. 70% of the earth’s surface is covered with water.

It is important to study Earth because it is the one place in the entire solar system where humans can live. When you think of NASA, you probably think of astronauts, satellites, Mars rovers, and telescopes that study distant planets and far off galaxies. NASA is a space agency.

The Earth’s interior is the basis for geology. If you recall from the Plate Tectonics section, earth exists as we see it today because of plate tectonics. Studying the interior of the Earth helps learn about all of these and the processes that helped create the Earth and currently drive plate tectonics.

With the heavy inner core, the earth’s orbit and rotation will remain stable over the long term, giving us day and night and summer and winter. These swirling convection currents result in the earth’s magnetic field which keeps us properly oriented for travel, and shields earth from deadly cosmic rays.

Scientists believe that deep down inside the Earth, there’s a huge ball of liquid and solid iron. This is the Earth’s core, and it protects us from the dangerous radiation of space. This magnetic field extends out from the Earth for thousands of kilometers, and redirects the solar wind blowing from the Sun.

The plate tectonics revolution went only so deep. Seismic waves passing through the deep Earth suggested that beneath the broken skin of plates lies a 2800-kilometer layer of rocky mantle overlying 3470 kilometers of molten and—at the center—solid iron. …