Falling Ice Chunks Mystify Scientists

There have been a couple of mysterious incidents recently in which large ice chunks have fallen out of clear skies:

Twice in one week large chunks of ice have inexplicably fallen from the sky in California, leaving experts mystified.

In Loma Linda, Calif., Thursday a chunk of ice the size of a microwave oven came crashing through the roof of a recreation center, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The ice then fragmented into several opaque, white chunks. No one was injured in the incident.

"I've been in the fire service for 31 years. I've heard and read about these things, but I've never seen this in person,'' Rolland Crawford, division chief of the Loma Linda Fire Department, told the paper.

April 8 in Oakland a similar ice ball plunged to earth in a field at a park, making a 2-foot crater in the ground.

A typical explanation may involve ice falling from an airplane, but ice caused by leaks from a plane's lavatory is blue in color and these objects were white. Myriad other hypotheses have been offered, with one scientist even blaming global warming.

You just knew that global warming was going to come in here somewhere. And how could that be?

According to the Chronicle report, Martinez-Frias suggests global warming has caused a new, steeper temperature difference between warm and cold air in the upper atmosphere that generates turbulent up-and-down winds, repeating the hail-formation process, even without a thunderstorm.

I suppose to some scientists, global warming can explain anything.