Massive Hail Becomes More Common in Warmer Climate We at The Weather Channel are used to seeing hail damage to homes, but imagine a hail the size of an Xbox crashing through your roof. Ice bombs are called megacryometeors; in other words, large icy rocks fallen from the sky. They may have small ice bubbles and hail-like layers. Dozens of them can fall to Earth every year across the planet. Apparently one rock weighed more than 600 pounds. These chunks of ice have been recorded for over 200 years and have recently been investigated as coming from airplanes. Note that reports of giant ice rocks have been occurring for as long as 200 years; we will return to it. Let’s start with the most recent case: Whittier, California – April 10, 2026. A home below the LAX gate was bombed by a dirty, smelly rock of ice at 11:15 am. The rock fell through the roof of the house and landed on a couch to melt. The FAA was called in to investigate. “We’re lucky Yuder wasn’t in his living room when this block of ice came through his roof,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn. Get more of our news on Google Set The Weather Company as a ‘Preferred Source’ for faster access to the news you value. They never released a report on the incident, but given the circumstances, it seems relatively easy to conclude that this ice bomb came from an airplane, but those conclusions don’t come as easily from other incidents. Ice crashed through a roof in California (Los Angeles County Supervisor) As we’ll discuss next, this airplane theory doesn’t cover every case. (MORE: Five Things You Should Know About Hail) Palm Coast, Florida – February 3, 2025 A 6-foot by 3-foot block of ice slammed into a metal roof, but the FAA quickly ruled out an airplane as the source. In a statement to First Coast News, the FAA stated that “the FAA contacted the airlines whose aircraft were operating in that area when the incident occurred. Inspections of those aircraft found no evidence of water leaks that could have caused ice to form on the outside of the hail.” plane.” The Palm Beach Fire Department posted about the incident here. How Ice Bombs Might Be Created It’s entirely possible that megacryometeors come from both non-natural sources (airplanes) and natural sources (the atmosphere). Recently, scientists have established clearer defining characteristics between those two groups, even arguing that we shouldn’t call ice bombs from artificial sources megacryometeors. A 2006 study confirmed that at least some of the falling ice chunks did not come from from planes not even from outer space, but from the atmosphere itself (WATCH: The scale of hail: determining how much damage could be seen) The authors concluded that there were some atmospheric signals that preceded the ice bombs: a drop in the coldest layer of the atmosphere by 12,000 feet and an increase in humidity. Stronger wind shear, on the other hand, is known to help when planes leak water or other materials from toilets. Liquid can freeze instantly as planes fly at higher altitudes. Those chunks of ice then melt and fall off as the planes descend. This is probably what happened in the California case, but this certainly doesn’t cover all cases, as there are some reports of such large chunks of ice falling from the sky as early as the 1850s. That’s half a century before the Wright Brothers took their craft into the sky. No matter how ice bombs form, they can be dangerous or deadly given their size. Unfortunately, they are not easy to predict, but if I owned a home near an airstrip, I would double check my homeowner’s insurance and maybe add some protection to my roof, then hope the atmosphere didn’t have any extra tricks of its own. winter storms. He is a two-time graduate of Florida State University and a proud graduate of St. Petersburg College.
