In this talk, I will introduce a new statistic on Weyl groups called the atomic length, and clarify this terminology by drawing parallels with the usual Coxeter length. It turns out that the atomic length has a natural Lie-theoretic interpretation, based on crystal combinatorics, that I will present. Last but not least, I will explain how this can be used as a tool for tackling a broad range of enumeration problems arising from modular representation theory (and related to the study of core partitions).