Dumping Ground for Random Thoughts

Scientist holds record-setting hailstonethat fell in Coffeyville, Kansas, in 1970.

Disturbingly, outlandishly big. Hailstones are born deep inside the gusty green turbulence of cumulonimbus thunderclouds. In such storms, powerful updrafts of more than one hundred miles per hour can suck raindrops as high as eleven miles into the sky, quickly turning them into ice crystals. These crystals collide into one another to form tiny pebbles of hail that can make numerous trips down and back up again to the upper reaches of the storm cloud. As it accrues one onion-like layer of ice after another, the stone will eventually become so immense that the updrafts canno longer support it, and it plummets to the ground.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says thelargest hailstone in the United States fell near the home of Dan White inCoffeyville, Kansas on September 3, 1970. It measured 17.5 inches incircumference and weighed 1.67 pounds. “I hope I never see anything likethat again,” says White, noting that NOAA meteorologists made a plastercast of the spiky orb-now displayed at the Dalton Defenders Museumin downtown Coffeyville. “I saw this green wall cloud coming, and Isaid, ‘We’re going to get some hail out of that!’ The boys went out withbuckets to hunt for hailstones. It’s a good thing they were wearing theirfootball helmets- they would have been knocked lulu!”