The atmosphere mentioned in the Quran over 1400 years ago.
“By the sky which returns.”
(Quran 86:11)
“[He] who made for you the earth a bed [spread out] and the sky a ceiling…”
(Quran 2:22)
In the first verse God swears by the sky[1] and its function of ‘returning’ without specifying what it ‘returns.’ In Islamic doctrine, a divine oath signifies the magnitude of importance of a special relation to the Creator, and manifests His majesty and the supreme Truth in a special way.
The second verse describes the Divine Act that made the sky a ‘ceiling’ for the dwellers of earth.
Let us see what modern atmospheric science has to say about the role and function of the sky.
The atmosphere is a word which denotes all the air surrounding the earth, from the ground all the way up to the edge from which space starts. The atmosphere is composed of several layers, each defined because of the various phenomena which occur within the layer.
“In the upper stratospheric regions, absorption of ultraviolet light from the Sun breaks down oxygen molecules; recombination of oxygen atoms with O2 molecules into ozone (O3) creates the ozone layer, which shields the lower ecosphere from harmful short-wavelength radiation…More disturbing, however, is the discovery of a growing depletion of ozone over temperate latitudes, where a large percentage of the world’s population resides, since the ozone layer serves as a shield against ultraviolet radiation, which has been found to cause skin cancer.”[6]
The mesosphere is the layer in which many meteors burn up while entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Imagine a baseball zipping along at 30,000 miles per hour. That’s how big and fast many meteors are. When they plow through the atmosphere, meteors are heated to more than 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, and they glow. A meteor compresses air in front of it. The air heats up, in turn heating the meteor.[7]
This is an image which shows the Earth and its atmosphere. The mesosphere would be the dark blue edge located on the far top of the image underneath the back. (Image courtesy of NASA)
Earth is surrounded by a magnetic force field - a bubble in space called “the magnetosphere” tens of thousands of miles wide. The magnetosphere acts as a shield that protects us from solar storms. However, according to new observations from NASA’s IMAGE spacecraft and the joint NASA/European Space Agency Cluster satellites, immense cracks sometimes develop in Earth’s magnetosphere and remain open for hours. This allows the solar wind to gush through and power stormy space weather. Fortunately, these cracks do not expose Earth’s surface to the solar wind. Our atmosphere protects us, even when our magnetic field does not.[8]
An artist’s rendition of NASA’s IMAGE satellite flying through a ‘crack’ in Earth’s magnetic field. How would it be possible for a fourteenth century desert dweller to describe the sky in a manner so precise that only recent scientific discoveries have confirmed it? The only way is if he received revelation from the Creator of the sky.
Footnotes:[1]Al-Samaa’, the Arabic word translated here as ‘sky’ includes earth’s atmosphere as indicated by the verse 2:164.
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