On August 16, 1960, Joe Kittinger stood at the edge of his balloon's gondola, 19 and a half miles above the Earth's surface, and leapt out into the near vacuum of the stratosphere. Almost 14 ...

The majority of our weather occurs here. The layer of the atmosphere that lies between 6 and 31 miles above the surface is known as the stratosphere. The polar vortex is within the stratosphere.

The stratosphere is the atmospheric layer extending from 10 km to about 50 km in altitude above the Earth's surface. Below this is the troposphere, which is in contact with the oceans and ...