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Featured image by NASA. All other images by Forrest M. Mims III.
This article appeared in Make: Vol. 98. Subscribe to Make: for the latest articles.
The ozone layer envelops the entire Earth and protects us all — animals and plants — from most of the sun’s dangerous ultraviolet rays. While there is some ozone at the surface, the main ozone layer begins at the bottom of the stratosphere, just above the troposphere where we live and where weather occurs. This boundary is called the tropopause.
You can see where the tropopause merges into the stratosphere when a major thunderstorm is nearby. The anvil-shaped top of these storms flattens out at the tropopause.
Astronauts can see the ozone layer when the sun is just below the horizon. The featured image above is a 2014 photograph made by as