Composition of Earth's Atmosphere

About This Dataset

This chart shows the composition of Earth's dry atmosphere by volume. Nitrogen and oxygen together account for about 99% of the air we breathe, with argon and a handful of trace gases making up the small remainder.

✨ AI Insight

Earth's dry air is overwhelmingly nitrogen (78.09%) and oxygen (20.95%), which together make up 99.04% of the atmosphere by volume. Argon, a chemically inert noble gas, is a distant third at 0.93%, and carbon dioxide, despite its outsized climate importance, is only 0.04%. Everything beyond that is a trace: neon, helium, methane, krypton and hydrogen each measure thousandths of a percent or less. The values span an enormous range, from nitrogen at 78% down to hydrogen at 0.00005%, a difference of more than a million-fold. Note that these figures are for dry air; water vapour, excluded here, can vary from near zero to several percent depending on location and weather.

Source: NASA Earth Fact Sheet

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

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Nitrogen leads with 78 in All Time.

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Average value in All Time: 11 · median: 0.

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Gap in All Time: Nitrogen is 1561800× larger than Hydrogen.