Altitude record!

The Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard and his assistant Paul Kipfer set off on a risky high-altitude flight in the night of 27 May: In a gas balloon they constructed themselves, they reached a flight altitude of over 15 kilometres after a short time. 17 hours later, after a dramatic flight, the balloon and its crew landed unharmed on a glacier in Austria.

Provisions for two days and oxygen for about 20 hours: Thus equipped, the aviation pioneers Piccard and Kipfer shoot up to the sky at 3.56 am. The starting point for their “suicide mission”, a meadow in Augsburg, is carefully chosen: Piccard does not want to land in water and Augsburg is about the same distance from all seas. There are also steady winds over the city.

The self-built aluminium sphere in which Piccard and Kipfer are squeezed has a diameter of only 2.10 metres. It is equipped with all kinds of measuring instruments. The two researchers want to explore the cosmic and radioactive radiation in the stratosphere. They have already made one failed launch attempt, but this time it seems to work: Just half an hour after take-off, they fly up more than 15 kilometres. At around 8 a.m. they break the altitude record: a whole 15,785 metres above the ground, they are the first people to see the curvature of the earth with their own eyes. But up there it gets unbearably hot: the temperature in the aluminium capsule measures almost 41 degrees Celsius. They have forgotten their water supplies. Tormented by thirst, they lick the condensation off the wall of the sphere.

Around noon, the flight pioneers want to land, but the gas valve won’t open: A line has become tangled. For hours the wind carries the balloon across the Alps. Finally the vehicle sinks. In the evening, at exactly 9 p.m., they finally have ground under their feet again: on a glacier near Obergurgl in the Ötztal valley, they land hard on a snowfield. Only in the morning can a rescue team save the balloonists. They are the heroes of this day!

Between hope and fear

In his logbook, Auguste Piccard describes the adventurous balloon flight and the failed attempts to land:

10.10 a.m.: You cannot pull the valve line. We are prisoners of the air. Condemned to wait until 2 or 3 or 4 o’clock. Then we come down.

10.25 a.m.: 39 degrees; upper body completely undressed. Heat so bearable.

2.08 p.m.: Inconceivable that the balloon does not want to sink.

As the Alps approach: The sight is overwhelming in and of itself. I have never seen such an abundance of mountains. The clouds surrounding the mountains add to the splendour. Everyone has already seen them, from below. Now we see them from above.

17.50 hrs: We only have four hours of oxygen left in the pressure bottle.

6.48 p.m.: Why, why aren’t we falling?

7.34 p.m.: It’s incomprehensible that we’re not sinking yet.

20.29 hrs: We won’t suffocate, but high mountains!

9 pm: Landing

Free fall from space

From a height of 39 kilometres, the Austrian Felix Baumgartner plunged from a balloon capsule into the depths. During his death-defying jump, he broke the sound barrier and reached a top speed of 1342 kilometres per hour. After four minutes and 19 seconds of free fall, he had solid ground under his feet again.

“It was much more difficult than we assumed,” Baumgartner said later. Yesterday, above the US state of New Mexico, he is carried into the stratosphere by a balloon capsule. His jump went according to plan, but shortly afterwards the 43-year-old Austrian went into a spin. He rolled over again and again. The images are broadcast around the globe, and the whole world holds its breath at the sight. “It was brutal,” Baumgartner recalls of the near-catastrophe: “For seconds I thought I would lose consciousness.” Finally, he manages to stop the death-defying tumble with his arms.

When he finally lands safely on earth with his parachute, he kneels down on the desert sand. He raises his hands to the sky: he has actually survived the insane jump. But something else already worries him: “I hope we went supersonic,” he shouts. The measurements confirm it: During his jump he broke the sound barrier and reached a top speed of 1342 kilometres per hour.

This makes him the first person to move faster than sound without an aeroplane or spaceship. In addition, he now holds the record for the highest manned balloon flight. And never before had a person parachuted from such an insane height. “Congratulations also from us to Felix Baumgartner, a very, very brave skydiver!” then also congratulated the European Space Agency ESA via Twitter.

Perfect preparation

Felix Baumgartner had been preparing for his life-threatening jump for five long years. Physically, he is in top shape. But that is not nearly enough for such a risk: a fireproof pressure suit was his life insurance. The heated suit ensured his body temperature during the jump. A hole in it would have been fatal, because at altitude the temperatures are as low as minus 70 degrees Celsius and the air pressure is extremely low. Oxygen is scarce, so the Austrian was supplied with breathing air through the helmet. During the fall, he was able to keep in contact with his team on the ground via the helmet. He could also have opened a parachute via emergency buttons on the suit, which stabilised the flight. He did not use them: that would have endangered his record.

Breathtaking: Mount Everest conquered without oxygen equipment!

No sensible person would have thought it possible: Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler have climbed the highest mountain on earth without oxygen equipment. Completely exhausted but happy, the two extreme mountaineers arrived at base camp yesterday.

Their summit attempt on Everest begins on 8 May, at half past five in the morning, after an icy night in the tent. They have been on their way up from base camp since 6 May. The warnings of many doctors do not scare them: they want to climb the roof of the world without artificial oxygen. One failed attempt is already behind them. They are now making another attempt from an altitude of almost 8,000 metres. The climb in the thin high-altitude air is an ordeal, every step is torture. But the two are in top shape, and they have experience.

At noon they reach an altitude of 8,800 metres. Their legs are heavy as lead, the fatigue hard to describe. But they overcome their pain and trudge on, as if in a trance. Finally they achieve the seemingly impossible: they stand on the summit of Everest. A world record! From exhaustion, they let themselves fall into the snow. After a long break, Messner takes his camera out of his backpack and films. Back in the tent, they radio the base camp: they have made it!

During the night Messner is tormented by terrible eye pain: he is snow-blind. Habeler is injured in the ankle. Nevertheless, on 10 May the two of them manage the descent to base camp. Only now do they realise their success, a sense of triumph fills them. The sensation is perfect: Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner have proved that Mount Everest can be climbed without oxygen equipment.

In the death zone

Doctors had warned Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler that moving around at 8,000 metres without artificial oxygen was extremely dangerous to one’s health. Brain cells could die and controlled thinking could cease, and there was also a risk of unconsciousness. “You will come back as idiots,” they said briefly and drastically.

In fact, altitude sickness is not to be trifled with. From about 2,000 metres, the thinning air can make itself felt through shortness of breath, dizziness, headaches or vomiting. With increasing altitude, the lungs absorb less and less oxygen, and the body is undersupplied. Above 7,000 metres – in the death zone – most people become unconscious if they do not receive supplementary oxygen. In the worst case, the extreme altitude leads to death. This fact has already cost many mountaineers their lives. The fact that Habeler and Messner climbed the summit without breathing apparatus really borders on a miracle. It can only be explained with the most precise planning, fabulous physical fitness and an iron will.

The layers of the atmosphere

Similar to the storeys of a multi-storey house, the atmosphere is divided into several layers. These layers have different properties – let’s start with the “ground floor”:

Whether dark thunderclouds or blue skies, gentle breezes or strong winds: almost all weather events take place up to an altitude of 15 kilometres. This lower layer of the atmosphere is therefore also called the weather layer. Scientists call it the troposphere. About 90 percent of all the air and almost all the water vapour in the Earth’s atmosphere is contained in this layer. The higher it is in the troposphere, the colder it gets: Icy temperatures of up to minus 80 degrees Celsius prevail at its upper limit.

In the layer above, the stratosphere, the temperature suddenly rises again. At an altitude of about 50 kilometres, the thermometer even reaches a value around 0 degrees Celsius. The reason for this warming is the ozone layer that lies within the stratosphere. It acts like a heater: it absorbs the UV radiation of the sun and converts it into heat.

Above the stratosphere, at an altitude of 50 to 80 kilometres, lies the mesosphere. Because this layer contains no ozone, it gets bitterly cold again, down to minus 100 degrees Celsius. This makes the mesosphere the coldest layer of the atmosphere. This is where dust particles and smaller rock fragments from space are trapped, which would otherwise crash to Earth as meteorites. We can sometimes see these celestial bodies in the sky at night as shooting stars.

Above the mesosphere, the air becomes thinner and thinner. The Earth’s gravitational pull weakens with increasing altitude and can therefore hold the gas particles less and less. Thus, the thermosphere forms a smooth transition into space over hundreds of kilometres. The thermosphere gets its name from the high temperatures that prevail here: they rise up to 1700 degrees. However, it is not hot according to our imagination, because there are too few gases buzzing around for it to feel hot.

A shell of gas

Seen from space, it appears like a fine bluish veil that wraps around the Earth: the atmosphere. It is the envelope of air that surrounds our planet. Compared to the diameter of the Earth, this envelope is quite thin: if the Earth were the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be about the thickness of its skin.

Without the atmosphere, there would be no life on this planet, because plants, animals and humans need air to breathe. It protects us from the cold and from harmful radiation from space. It also allows meteorites to burn up before they can hit the earth’s surface. This air envelope is vital for us – but what is it actually made of?

The atmosphere is a mix of different gases. A large part of this gas mixture is nitrogen: at 78 per cent, that’s almost four-fifths of the entire atmosphere. Only 21 percent consists of oxygen, which we need to breathe. The remaining one percent is made up of various trace gases – gases that only occur in the atmosphere in traces. These trace gases include methane, nitrogen oxides and, above all, carbon dioxide, or CO2 for short. Although the proportion of CO2 is quite small, this trace gas has a huge influence on our earth’s climate. This can be seen in the greenhouse effect, which heats up our planet.

The fact that the Earth has an atmosphere at all is due to gravity. It holds the gas molecules on the earth and prevents them from simply flying out into space. In fact, the air becomes thinner and thinner with increasing altitude and thus decreasing gravity. At altitudes as low as 2000 metres above sea level, this can become unpleasantly noticeable for people: They suffer from altitude sickness with shortness of breath, headaches and nausea. Extreme mountaineers who want to climb high peaks like the 8,000-metre peaks of the Himalayas therefore usually take artificial oxygen with them on their tour.

How did our air come to breathe?

What do humans and animals need to live? Food and water, of course, but above all oxygen! We get it from the air we breathe. But it wasn’t always like this: the primordial atmosphere consisted of gases such as carbon dioxide and foul-smelling hydrogen sulphide in addition to water vapour. We would immediately suffocate on this “air”. But what has changed since then? Why is there oxygen in the atmosphere today? And since when?

If you look back in the history of the Earth, you will find traces of living beings that must have needed oxygen more than two billion years ago. So there must have been oxygen in the air back then.

Even older are fossilised traces of microscopically small bacteria called blue-green algae. These organisms were the first to be able to use the energy of sunlight for their metabolism. They absorbed water and carbon dioxide from their environment and, with the help of solar energy, converted them into sugar, which served them as an energy store. In addition, this chemical reaction produced oxygen – as a waste product, so to speak. However, the bacteria could not do anything with the oxygen and simply released it into the environment.

At that time, there was plenty of sunlight and carbon dioxide and the oceans were comparatively warm. These were the best conditions for the blue-green algae, and so they were able to proliferate and spread. In the process, they produced more and more oxygen, which accumulated over millions of years, first in the oceans and later in the atmosphere.

Thus, the waste product of these bacteria created the conditions for higher life forms in the water and on land. The bacteria later gave rise to the chloroplasts that capture solar energy in every plant to this day. The principle of so-called photosynthesis has also remained the same: With the help of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide are converted into sugar and oxygen. The sugar serves as a nutrient for the plant, the oxygen is released into the air and inhaled by humans and animals.