  Surface bubbles have attracted much interest in the past decades. In this
article, we propose to explore the lifetime and thinning dynamics of
centimetric surface bubbles. We study the impact of the bubbles size as well as
that of the atmospheric humidity through a careful control and systematic
variation of the relative humidity in the measuring chamber. We first adress
the question of the drainage under saturated water vapor conditions and show
that a model including both capillary and gravity driven drainage provides the
best prediction for this process. Additionally, unprecedented statistics on the
bubbles lifetimes confirm experimentally that this parameter is set by
evaporation to leading order. We make use of a model based on the overall
thinning dynamics of the thin film and assume a rupture thickness of the order
10-100 nm to obtain a good representation of these data. For experiments
conducted far from saturation, the convective evaporation of the bath is shown
to dominate the overall mass loss in the cap film due to evaporation.
