Ocean Air
Listen in RealAudio
Email your weather question

Okay, put your thinking caps on for this question:

Where is the world's largest ocean?

Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

Here's the answer: If you include all fluids, including water AND air, it's above us!

We all live in the ocean of air, called the atmosphere, and if you extend the ocean concept a little, you could say we're just a bunch of bottom feeders.

Air and water move around without breaking apart, because they are fluids. This fluid movement in the ocean is called currents or waves, and the movement of the air in the atmosphere is called -- currents and waves, which is better known as WIND!

Water fills the oceans of the world up to sea-level making it a liquid, a type of fluid. Liquids, to put it simply, are fluids with a top. Air isn't a liquid, it's a gas, another kind of fluid, and as a result, the atmosphere is far less enslaved by gravity than is the more dense liquid ocean. The atmosphere just kind of thins out into nothing, a few hundred miles above our heads. There is no atmosphere level like there is a sea level, a key difference in these two fluid oceans. So air -- a gas, and water -- a liquid, are both fluid. Both make oceans, with currents and waves, and together move people around the planet. As for me, I think I'll just head out for a short swim, uh, walk across the bottom of the ocean of air.

The Weather Notebook is produced by the Mount Washington Observatory, funded by The National Science Foundation, and Subaru of America For more on the atmosphere, go to our website at weathernotebook.org