if heat rises. why is it cold at the top of a mountain?

Answer 1

This is actually an excellent question, but you've recieved a lot of fairly poor answers.
1 - It is not colder at the top of mountains because "you are closer to space and it's really cold in space". That's idiotic, and ignores the fact that once you get about 18km from the surface the atmosphere actually gets WARMER with elevation.

2. The idea that the surface of the planet warmer because is closer to the hot core of the inner earth is completely untrue. The lithosphere (crust) of the earth is an excellent insulator and it does not allow heat from the inner earth to reach the surface of the planet in any significant way. If that were the case then the poles of the planet would not be so much colder than the rest of the planet. And again - this ignores the fact that the upper atmosphere gets hotter as you go up.

I can't say that I actually knew the answer myself, but I did look it up instead of just guessing like most of these people. Here is what Wikipedia says about temperature and the atmosphere....

The temperature of the Earth's atmosphere varies with altitude; the mathematical relationship between temperature and altitude varies between the different atmospheric layers:

* troposphere: From the Greek word "tropos" meaning to turn or mix. The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere starting at the surface going up to between 7 km (4.4 mi) at the poles and 17 km (10.6 mi) at the equator with some variation due to weather factors. The troposphere has a great deal of vertical mixing due to solar heating at the surface. This heating warms air masses, which then rise to release latent heat as sensible heat that further uplifts the air mass. This process continues until all water vapor is removed. In the troposphere, on average, temperature decreases with height due to expansive cooling.
* stratosphere: from that 7–17 km range to about 50 km, temperature increasing with height.
* mesosphere: from about 50 km to the range of 80 km to 85 km, temperature decreasing with height.
* thermosphere: from 80–85 km to 640+ km, temperature increasing with height.
* exosphere: from 500-1000 km up to 10,000 km, free-moving particles that may migrate into and out of the magnetosphere or the solar wind.

The boundaries between these regions are named the tropopause, stratopause, mesopause, thermopause and exobase.

The average temperature of the atmosphere at the surface of Earth is 14 °C.
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I hope this answers your question.

Answer 2

The atmosphere basically acts as a blanket, keeping the surface from freezing to the near Absolute Zero temperatures common in vacuums. Since the atmosphere gets thinner as altitude rises, the ’blanketing’ effect diminishes. Also, the suns heat transfers more or less through the atmosphere and is (mostly) stored in the oceans and surface - meaning that even though ultimately the sun is the real source of the heat, the gain in being "higher" is more than offset by the disadvantage of being further away from the proximate heater - sea level surfaces.

You may already know about the relationship between temperature and pressure: When you pressurize air (or any gas), it gets hotter, and when you release the pressure on air it gets colder. So a bicycle pump gets hot when you pump up a tire, and a spray paint can or a C02 cartridge gets cold as you release the pressurized gas. A refrigerator puts both of these processes together, pressurizing gas on the outside of the refrigerator to release heat and decompressing it inside the refrigerator to absorb heat (see How Refrigerators Work for details).

You may also know that air pressure decreases as altitude increases. This table shows the pressure (in pounds per square inch) at different altitudes:


Altitude Air Pressure
Sea level 14.7 PSI
10,000 feet 10.2 PSI
20,000 feet 6.4 PSI
30,000 feet 4.3 PSI
40,000 feet 2.7 PSI
50,000 feet 1.6 PSI

As air rises, the pressure decreases. It is this lower pressure at higher altitudes that causes the temperature to be colder on top of a mountain than at sea level.

Answer 3

I am a meteorologist. The last answer was by far the best one of this group and some of the others are completely not true. The short answer is that as air rises, it encounters air at a lower pressure (pressure is a measure of the weight of the air, so as you go up in the atmosphere, there is less air pressing down on you from above, thus less air pressure). With the lower air pressure, the volume of air that is rising (called a parcel of air) expands in order to equalize the pressure on the inside of this parcel with that outside the volume (the air pushing on the outside of the parcel). The molecules in this larger parcel now have more room to move, and collide with each other and the edges of the parcel less (there are still the same number of molecules in there). Thus, they slow down due to less collisions. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of air, which is essentially the speed of the molecules. A slower speed means a lower temperature. This whole process is called adiabatic cooling, and it happens to all air as it rises from the surface.

There are other processes that offset some (or sometimes all) of this cooling, such as the condensation of water or an inversion created by radiational cooling at the Earth's surface, but for what you're talking about for the scale of a mountain, this adiabatic cooling is the reason. I hope this makes sense.

Answer 4

Mountain height is too much from mean sea level.
with height gases become less dense
sun heat up earth in day time. cloud/atmosphere absorb
reflective heat from earth (to make it hotter than top of mountain)

Answer 5

Simple: Because air at the top of the mountain is thinner, therefore less capable of retaining solar radiation. Also, winds are higher in high elevations, creating a cooling effect. Also, being close to the Earth's core has something to do with it, wouldn't you think?

Answer 6

heat is held down by the attmosphere c02 and there is less atmosphere the further away from the eath you get. Space is very cold. YOu should rent the movie "An unconvienent Truth" Al Gore it explains some of this and how the earth is in a state of global warming.

Answer 7

The air/atmosphere is thinner at high altitudes and without a thicker atmosphere the heat is lost and therefore it is colder.

Answer 8

heat rises to a certain extent. lol. they usually evarates water that makes clouds so if u go past that....especially pas the troposphere...it's gonna get crazy cold.

Answer 9

The air is rarefied.
Temperature is given by the vibration of molecules.
Less molecules for unit of volume means less temperature.

Answer 10

the closer u r to space the colder it is b/c space is so freezing cold and also the atmoshere makes the air a lot thinner so its colder the highter u get.