Evangelista Torricelli, one of the first to discover atmospheric pressure, once said, "We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element air." The Earth's gravitational field is pulling ...

Behind Earth, on its dark side, pressure from the solar wind pushes the planet's outermost atmosphere into a bulbous tail that extends around 391,000 miles (630,000 kilometers) into deep space.

Aristotle suggested that air was one of four elements that also included earth, water ... which measures atmospheric pressure (a measure of the pressure exerted by the atmosphere on a surface).