Fortean Falls: Ice From The Sky, And Global Warming

Weird rains of toads, fish, blood, straw, sand etc. are well-documented. But are falls of large ice chunks a sign of global warming?

Since 1997, blather.net has been falls of all kinds of weird shit. We've documented fish falls, meteorites, people, cannonballs, frogs and loads more.

Charles Fort's Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), and Lo! (1931) record many of these reports of weird organic and apparently manufactured "rain" from all over the world, with all sorts of interesting ingredients, including alabaster, ants, ashes, beef, beetle larvae, berries, bitumen, blood, butter, charcoal, china fragments (naturally vitrified?), cinders, coal, cobwebs, coins, crabs, crayfish, eels, fish, flesh, gelatinous matter, grain, hay, ice, iron balls, jelly fish, limestone, lizards, mud, mussels, oyster shells, periwinkles, quartz, resin, salt, sand, sandalwood, seeds, silk, snails, snakes, spawn, spiders, carved and shaped stones, turtles, and of course, toads and frogs. More »

But then there's ice. Bloody huge chunks of itself, smashing down on houses and cars. Sometimes it's a funny colour (bluish) and it's assumed to have fallen from the loo of a high flying airliner. The Galway Advertiser of October 30th 2003 tells the story of one Thomas Delaney who was almost hit by a huge block of ice, which had a strong chemical 'portaloo' smell. The Irish Aviation Authority is investigating the matter - planes shouldn't drop their load until over the ocean. More »

But there are other causes...

On December 10th, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that a Spanish-American scientific team are researching megacryometeors - the technical name for big balls of ice from the sky. Jesus Martinez-Frias of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid has pioneered research on megacryometeors, following a spate of ice chunks fell on Spain for 10 days in January 2000, some of them up to 3kg in weight. None of them contained human waste or blue disinfectant. Analysis found that the water in the ice chunks was the same as in hailstones... but they seem to fall from cloudless skies.

Experts quoted by the Post-Gazette article differ in their opinions - something think that unusual atmospheric conditions are being caused by global warming, which causes higher temperatures on Earth's surface, but makes for colder conditions in the stratosphere.

Dr. David Travis, from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater reckons has linked ice falls to out of the ordinary conditions in the "tropopause," the boundary between the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) and the stratosphere (upper atmosphere). Warming of the lower earth may be making the lower atmosphere colder.

More: Are falling ice balls a product of global warming? »
Global warming turns ugly as nature attacks with giant ice balls »

And while we're on the subject of falls:

Update 22nd December 2003:

A woman in the Perth suburb of City Beach has received an unexpected
delivery when a window from a small plane fell into her backyard.
Lynn Salter says no one was injured yesterday by the falling window and the only damage was to a wrought-iron gate.
More »