A rough estimate of the entire weight of the atmosphere, as experienced at the Earth’s surface, would be a whopping 5 million billion tons. The ‘sky’ is made up of all the molecules in the atmosphere, which press down on you from above and in all directions to create what is known as air pressure.
On average, this column of air weighs 1.05 kilograms per square centimetre (15 pounds per square inch). Simply multiply this figure by the Earth’s total surface area (510 million square kilometres or 197 million square miles) and you can deduce the total mass of our planet’s atmosphere with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
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