We at The Weather Channel are used to seeing hail damage to homes, but imagine a hailstone the size of an Xbox coming through your roof. 

The ice bombs are called megacryometeors; in other words, big, icy rocks from the sky. They can have small ice bubbles and layers like hail. Dozens of them can fall to Earth each year all over the planet. One boulder apparently weighed in at over 600 pounds. 

Such globs of ice have been recorded for over 200 years and have recently been investigated as coming from planes. Keep in mind that reports of giant ice rocks have happened for 200 years; we’ll come back to it. 

Let’s start with the most recent case: 

Whittier, California – April 10, 2026 

A home that sits under the LAX approach was ice bombed by a dirty, foul-smelling boulder of ice at 11:15 a.m. The rock fell through the roof of the home, landing on a couch to melt. 

The FAA was called in to investigate. “We are lucky that Yuder was not in his living room when this block of ice crashed through his ceiling,” said County of Los Angeles Supervisor Janice Hahn. 

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They never published 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 so easily from other incidents. 

As we’ll talk about next, this theory about planes doesn’t cover all cases. 

(MORE: Five things you should know about hail)

Palm Coast, Florida – February 3, 2025

A 6-foot by 3-foot block of ice crashed through 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 airlines whose aircraft were operating in that area when the incident occurred. Inspections of those aircraft did not find evidence of water leaks that could have caused ice to form on the outside of the aircraft."

The Palm Beach Fire Department posted about the incident here.

How ice bombs might be created 

It is entirely possible that megacryometeors come from both unnatural sources (planes) and natural sources (the atmosphere). 

Recently, scientists have laid out 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 were not from airplanes or even outer space, but from the atmosphere itself. 

(WATCH: The hail scale: Determining how much damage you could see)

The authors concluded that there were some atmospheric cues that preceded ice bombs: A lowering of the coldest layer of the atmosphere by 12,000 feet and an increase in humidity. Stronger wind shear helps. 

On the other hand, it is known that when planes leak water or other materials from bathrooms (often called blue ice), that liquid can instantly freeze as planes fly at higher altitudes. 

Those chunks of ice then melt and fall off as planes descend. This is likely what happened in the California case. 

But this certainly doesn’t cover all of the cases since there are some reports of such large chunks of ice falling from the sky as early as the 1850s. 

That’s a half century before the Wright Brothers got their craft in the sky. I don’t think they needed any ice weighing down their biplane. 

No matter how the ice bombs form, they can be dangerous or deadly given their size. Unfortunately, they aren’t easy to predict, but if I were a homeowner under the approach of a runway, I would double-check my homeowners insurance and maybe add some protection to my roof, then hope the atmosphere doesn’t have any extra tricks of its own. 

Jonathan Belles has been a digital meteorologist for weather.com for 10 years. His favorite weather is tropical weather, but also enjoys covering high-impact weather and news stories and winter storms. He's a two-time graduate of Florida State University and a proud graduate of St. Petersburg College.