Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Bogobom here.

I'm looking up into the sky, be it a cloudy day or bright clear night with the stars

shining down.

It may seem like Earth's atmosphere is a single, solid mass, but our sky is more like

a lasagna, or maybe a trifle, with layers that ripple up and down depending on what's

beneath them, and merge into each other in different and interesting ways.

And today, though, let's talk about the layer called the stratosphere.

But first, we're all creatures of the troposphere, and this atmospheric layer is where almost

all of the weather-related phenomena on planet Earth unfold.

Although the troposphere begins at the surface of our planet, its upper boundary is less

consistent.

And depending on your latitude and the current season, the layers top might be located

anywhere from 4 to 7 miles, that 7 to 12 kilometers overhead.

Above the troposphere we have, in order, the stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and

exosphere.

But let's go back and talk about those first two layers more.

The troposphere, stratosphere boundary, or tropopause, separates two areas with inverted

temperature trends.

Inside the troposphere, the global average temperature decreases as you go higher.

Yet, it's a different story in the stratosphere, where things get warmer as you go higher.

Eventually, you'll hit the stratosphere's ceiling some 30 miles or 50 kilometers up.

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