A composition of a positive integer n is a finite sequence of positive integers a(1), a(2), ..., a(k) such that a(1) + a(2) + ... + a(k) = n. Let d be a fixed nonnegative integer. We say that we have an ascent of size d or more if a(i+1) >= a(i) + d. We determine the mean, variance and limiting distribution of the number of ascents of size d or more in the set of compositions of n. We also study the average size of the greatest ascent over all compositions of n.