Earth & SkyGreek → English
Troposphere
/ˈtroʊpəsfɪər/noun
The lowest layer of the atmosphere, where temperature falls with height and weather occurs.
The Greek roots
τροπή
tropḗ
a turning, change
σφαῖρα
sphaîra
ball, sphere
Literally: “turning sphere”
The story of the word
Léon Teisserenc de Bort sent unmanned balloons up from Versailles and found around 1900 that the temperature stopped dropping at roughly eleven kilometres. He named the churning layer below the troposphere, from τροπή, a turning, for the overturning that mixes it, and the calm layer above it the stratosphere, for its stacked layers. Almost all weather happens in the lower one, which is why airliners climb out of it as fast as they can.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 1900s
Same family
stratospheretropicheliotropeatmosphere
In a sentence
Nearly all the water vapour in the atmosphere sits in the troposphere.
The troposphere is thinner over the poles than over the equator.