tmosp keeps us    it, Eartemperature of minus 60 degrees Fa. In addition,tmosps ining sraviolet rays, and togetmospto a fifteen-foot tective crete, and    it tors fromspay daggers. Even raindrops    for tmosphere’s slowing drag.

        t striking t our atmosp t very muc. It extendsup 120 miles, eous andard desktop globe it    ts of varnish.

        For stifiveniemospo four unequal layers: tropospratospen called troposp t’s dear to us. It alone tains enougo alloo fun, t sly bees ungenial to life as you climb up t.

        From ground level to its    point, trop sp ten milest tor and no more temperate latitudes mospually all ter, and tually all tained mu you and oblivion.

        Beyond tropospratospop of a storm cloudflattening out into t tropospratospropopause and . Pause io stop momentarily but to cease altoget’s from t as menopause. Even at its greatest extent, tropopause is not very distant. A fastelevator of t used in modern skyscrapers could get you t ty mi to make trip. Suc pressurization    t, result in severe cerebral and pulmonary edemas, adangerous excess of fluids in tissues.    tform, anyone inside    certainly be dead or dying. Even a more measuredast    deal of disfort. temperature six miles up be -70 degrees Fa, and you    least very muce,supplementary oxygen.

        After you    tropospemperature soon o about 40degrees Fa, to tive effects of ozone (sometdiscovered on ). It to as loing to 2,700 degrees Fa or more in tly    very erratic temperatures    vary by a to nig must be said t “temperature” at suc bees a someional cept. temperature is really just a measure of tivity of molecules. At sealevel, air molecules are so t one molecule    move only ti distance—aboutto be precise—before banging into anotrillions ofmolecules are stantly colliding, a lot of    gets exc at t of t fifty miles or more, t any t and act. So alteras bettle    transfereellitesand spaces    any man-made objectorbiting at t level    into flame.

        Even so, spaceso take care imospicularly ourn trips toEarttle bia demonstrated all tically in February 2003.

        Altmosp es in at too steep an angle—more t 6 degrees—or too sly it    strike enougo gee drag of anexceedingly bustible nature. versely, if an inioo s could o space, like a pebble skipped across er.

        But you    veo tmospo be reminded of ime in a lofty city    o rise too many t from sea level before your body begins toprotest. Even experienced mountaineers, s of fitness, training, and bottledoxygen, quickly bee vulnerable at    to fusion, nausea, exion, frostbite,ite, and a great many otumbling dysfuns. In aic s o it    desigo operateso far above sea level.

        “Even u favorable circumstances,” ter ten ofditions atop Everest, “every step at t altitude demands a colossal effort of    force yourself to make every movement, reacuallytened by a leaden, deadly fatigue.” In t, tisaineerand filmmaker Matt Dison records isionup Everest, “found o deater a piece of ied fles Somervell mao cougru. It turned out to be “tire mucus lining of his larynx.”

        Bodily distress is notorious above 25,000 feet—to climbers as t many people bee severely debilitated, even dangerously ill, at s of nomore t or so. Susceptibility tle to do ness. Grannies sometimescaper about in lofty situations o il veyed to loitudes.

        te limit of olerance for tinuous living appears to be about 5,500meters, or 18,000 feet, but even people ditioo living at altitude could not tolerate sucs for long. Frances As, in Life at tremes,    t 5,800 meters, but t to desd 460 meters eauously at t elevation. People    altitude eionatelylarge d lungs, increasing ty of oxygen-bearing red blood cells by almost ats to and. Moreover, above 5,500 meters even t ed    provide agrous    it to its full term.

        In to make experimental balloon asts in Europe,somet surprised t got as temperature drops about3 degrees Fa    you climb. Logic o indicate tt to a source of , t of tion ist you are not really getting y-to move a couple of t closer to it is like taking oepcloser to a busralia o smell smoke.

        takes us back to tion of ty of molecules in tmosphere.

        Sunligoms. It increases te at e to one anot. ’s really excited atoms you feel. them.

        Air is deceptive stuff. Even at sea level, end to t    y of bulk, and t bulk oftes itself. As a marinestist named yville te more tury ago: “e sometimes fi nearly on ly piled upon us during t, but ion and buoyancy, si requires a little less exertion to move our bodies in t feel crus extra on of pressure is t be crus is made mostly ofinpressible fluids, w.

        But get air in motion, as iff breeze, and you    it oget 5,200 million milliontons of air around us—25 million tons for every square mile of t—a notinsequential volume.    millions of tons of atmosp at ty orforty miles an ’s    limbs snap and roof tiles go flying. As Antes, a typical    may sist of 750 million tons of cold air pinons of    is at timesmeteically exg.

        Certainly tage of energy in torm, ited,    tain an amount of energy equivalent to four days’ use ofelectricity for ted States. In t ditions, storm clouds    rise to sof six to ten miles and tain updrafts and dos of one en side by side,     to fly ternalturmoil particles rical tirelyuood ter particles tend to bee positively co be ed by aircurrents to top of ticles li tiivecively cicles o ruso tivelyyt gets in t of ligravels at270,000 miles an    t to a decidedly crisp 50,000 degreesFa, several times ter t any one moment 1,800torms are in progress around t across t every sed about a ning bolts    the sky is a lively place.

        Muc goes on up t. Jet streams, usuallylocated about 30,000 to 35,000 feet up,    bo up to 180 miles an lyinfluence ems over s, yet tence    suspected untilpilots began to fly into t deal ofatmospood. A form of ion popularly knourbulence occasionally enlivens airplane flig ty sucs a yearare serious enougo need rep. t associated ructures oranyt    be detected visually or by radar. t pockets of startlingturbulen tranquil skies. In a typical i, a plane en route fromSingapore to Sydney ral Australia in calm ditions —enougo fling unsecured people against twelve peoplewere injured, one seriously. No one knows w causes sucive cells of air.

        t moves air around in tmosp drives ternal engine of t, namely veoist, orial regionsrises until it s tropopause and spreads out. As it travels aor and cools, it sinks.    s bottom, some of to fill and or, pleting t.

        At tor tion process is generally stable and tably fair,but in temperate zoerns are far more seasonal, localized, and random, tle betems of ems are created by rising air, o tually rain. arm air    ure tropical andsummer storms tend to be t. tend to be associated , itoften bees ma in taratus clouds—tureless spra give us our overcast skies—ure-bearing updraftslack to break table air above, and instead spread out, likesmoke ting a ceiling. Indeed, if you cime, you    get a very goodidea of cte in a still room. Atfirst, it goes straigo impress anyone), and t spreads out in a diffused, est superputer in takingmeasurements in t carefully trolled enviro, ot tell you ake, so you    imagiies t froeists o predict sus in a spinning, windy, large-scale world.

        because    from tributed, differences inair pressure arise on t. Air ’t abide t rusrying to equalizetrying to keep to areas of lo; tank—aly tpressured air s to get someplace else), aer the wind blows.

        Ially,    t accumulate, groially, so a    ten times stroy miles an    a imes stronger—and    mucructive.

        Introduce several million tons of air to tor effed t    be exceedinglyeic. A tropical y-four ion like Britain or France uses in a year.

        tmospo seek equilibrium    suspected by Edmonded upon iury by on Gee    rising and falling ns of air teoproduce “cells” (kno in ter all, Englised a liions of air t give us our trade tecave-Gaspard de Coriolis, ails of teras in 1835, andt t. (Coriolis’s otin at to introduceercoolers, ly.) t a brisk1,041 miles an    tor, toe slopes offsiderably, to about 600 miles an a . If you are on tor tocarry you quite a distance—about 40,000 kilometers—to get you back to t. If youstand beside travel only a fe to plete arevolutio in bot takes ty-fet you back to where you began.

        t follo t to tor ter you must be spinning.

        t explains o tance, seem to curve to t in to t in t. tandard o envision to imagine yourself at ter of a large carousel and tossing a ball tosomeone positioned on time ts to ter, target perso looks as if it    is t, and it is ems tops. t is also    to left een miles e by about a o the sea.

        sidering tical and psyce of to nearly everyo’s surprising t metey didn’t really get going as a stil sly before turn of teentury (term metey itself    . Granger in a book of logic).

        Part of t successful metey requires t oftemperatures, and ters for a long time proved more difficult to make texpect. An accurate reading    oing a very even bore in a glass tube, andt    easy to do. t person to crack t, aDutcruments, er in 1717. ed trument in a    put freezing at 32 degrees andboiling at 212 degrees. From tset tricity botronomer, came up ing scale. In proof of tion t iors seldom get matters entirely rig zeroand freezing point 100 on    t was soon reversed.

        t frequently identified as tey    teentury. ypes their names in 1803.

        Altive and respected member of ty and employedLinnaean principles in y as to announce em of classification. (ty,you may just recall from an earlier cer, ed to trous oxide, so ed atioion it deserved. It is a point on ratus for tin), and cirrus (meaning “curled”) for tions t generally presage colder o tlyadded a fourterm, nimbus (from tin for “cloud”), for a rain cloud. ty ofem    ts could be freely rebio describe everysratocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulogestus, and so on. Ite , and not just in England. t Joake ed four poems to howard.

        em o over t ttle read Iional Cloud Atlas runs to t iingly virtually all t-ypes—mammatus, pileus, nebulosis, spissatus, floccus, and mediocris area sampling— on side metey and not terribly mucold. Ially, t, mu of t atlas, produced in 1896,divided clouds into ten basic types, of    cushiony-looking wasnumber nine, cumulonimbus.

        1t seems to o be oncloud nine.”

        For all t and fury of torm cloud, tually a benign and surprisingly insubstantial to a side may tain no more ty-five or ty gallons of er—“about enougo fill a batrefil ed. You    get some sense of terial quality of clouds by strolling ter all, not lacks to fly. to quote trefil again: “If you ypicalfog, you o tact    er—not enougogive you a det drink.” In sequence, clouds are not great reservoirs of er. Only about0.035 pert of ter is floating around above us at any moment.

        Depending on er molecule varies    lands iile soil it s or reevaporated directly finds its o ter,    may not see sunlig gets really deep.    a lake, you are looking at acolle of molecules t    a decade. In time is t to be more like a oget 60 pert of1If you ruck by ifully crisp ao be, in a cumulus cloud t interior of t. Any er molecule t strays beyond tely zapped by to keep its fine edge. Muc soclearly delied, o be blurry at the edges.

        er molecules in a rainfall are returo tmosped, the skybefore falling again as rain.

        Evaporation is a s process, as you    easily gauge by te of a puddle on asummer’s day. Even someterranean    in a t    tinually replenis occurred a little under six millionyears ago and provoked o sce as ty Crisis.    tial movement closed trait of Gibraltar. As terraneandried, its evaporated tents fell as freser rain into oting tiness—indeed, making t dilute enougo freeze over larger areas than normal.

        t and puso an iceage. So at least theoes.

        is certainly true, as far as ell, is t a little c, as le furted us.

        Os are t’s surface beeistsincreasingly treat os and atmospem, tle of our attention er is marvelous at ransp . Every day,tream carries an amount of    to Europe equivalent to tput of coalfor ten years, h adaand Russia.

        But er also est days. For t reason tends to be a lag in tronomical start of aseason and tual feeling t t season arted. S may officially start in t it doesn’t feel like it in most places until April at t.

        t one uniform mass of er. temperature, salinity,depty, and so on s on    around, s climate. tlantic, for instance, is saltier too. tier er is t is, and dense er sinks. it its extra burden of salt, tlantic currents o tic,    deprivingEurope of all t kindly    of    transfer o is knoion, s far belo detected by tist-adventurer t von Rumford in 1797.

        2    surface ers, as t to ty of Europe, groo greatdeptrip back to tarctica,t up in tarctic Circumpolar Current,     take 1,500 years for er to travel from term means a number of to different people, it appears. In November 2002, Carl unscpublis in Sce, " Is tion?," in    to signify at least seven different pion at tion driven by differences iy or buoyancy, "meridional overturning circulation of mass," and soon)-to do ions and transfer of , tiously vague and embragsense in w here.

        Nortlantic to t t ae is enormous.

        (As for tion of     takes a drop ofer to get from one o to anot stists    measure poundsin ter like    t of measurements from differeions t ter’s movement.)tion not only moves    around, but also o stir up nutrients asts rise and fall, making greater volumes of table for fisures. Unfortunately, it appears tion may also be very sensitive toputer simulations, even a modest dilution of ttent—from increased melting of t, for instance—could disrupt trously.

        t favor for us. tremendous volumes of carbon andprovide a means for it to be safely locked aies of our solar system is tt 25 pert more brigem was young.

        ted in a muc AubreyManning    it, “tely catastropon t it appears t our world ed.”

        So able and cool?

        Life does. trillions upon trillions of tiny marine anisms t most of us ure atmosp falls as rain and use it (in bination o make tiny s frombeing reevaporated into tmosp iny foraminiferans and coccolito ttomof to limesto is remarkable, ural feature like te Cliffs of Dover in England, to reflect t it ismade up of not tiny deceased marine anisms, but even more remarkable er. A six-in ers of pressed carbon dioxide t    all. Altoget ty times as mucmospually muc limestone urn to tmospo term carbon cycle. takes a verylong time—about ypical carbon atom—but in turba    keepiable.

        Unfortunately, ion for disrupting tting lots of extra carbon into tmosp ornot. Since 1850, it imated,    a ons of extracarbon into total t increases by about seven billion tons eaot actually all t mucure—mostly ts—sends about 200 billion tons of carbon dioxide into tmospy times as mucories. But you o look att ies to see ribution makes.

        e kno tural” level of carbon dioxide in tmosp is, before arted inflating it rial activity—is about 280 partsper million. By 1958, arted to pay attention to it, it o 315parts per million. today it is over 360 parts per million and rising by rouger of 1pert a year. By ty-first tury it is forecast to rise to about 560 partsper million.

        So far, ts ( as Peter Cox of tiseical Office puts it:

        “tical tural biospops buffering us from ts ofour emissions and actually starts to amplify t to adapt, many trees and ots ores of carbon and adding to tant past even    a ribution. t evenure is quite    is almost certaiually t itself aurn to a situation of stability and    time t took a mere sixty thousand years.
请记住本书首发域名：966xs.com。966小说手机版阅读网址：wap.966xs.com