“I suppose the surprising thing is why the atmosphere doesn’t all fall immediately to the Earth’s surface to form a thin dense layer of air molecules.
The reason this doesn’t happen is that air molecules are all whizzing around at surprisingly high speeds - typically hundreds of metres per second depending on the temperature.
The air molecules bash into each other and knock each other around, and the air molecules near the ground bash into the air molecules above them and stop them falling down.”
If it were zero then all the air would indeed just fall down to the ground (actually, this is a simplification I’ll address later).
As you increase the temperature the atoms of the ground will start to wiggle more and they’ll start to kick the air molecules giving them non-zero average height.
So the atmosphere would move a little off the ground. The bigger the temperature is the higher the atmosphere will reach.
Note: there are number of assumptions above that simplify the picture. They are not that important but I want to provide a complete picture:
1, Even at the zero temperature the molecules would wiggle a little because of quantum mechanics
2, The atmosphere would freeze at some point (like 50K) so under that temperature it would just lie on the ground
3, I assumed that the ground and the atmosphere have the same temperature because they are in the thermal equilibrium; in reality their temperatures can differ a little because of additional slow heat-transfer processes.”
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Why and how does atmosphere exist? Shouldn't all oxygen (and everthing else) fall down due to gravity?