What are giant hailstones?

Giant hailstones are like giant ice pebbles that fall from the sky during a big storm.

Imagine you're playing with marbles in your bathtub, and instead of just small ones, you have huge ones, so big they could be as large as a baseball or even bigger! That's what giant hailstones feel like when they hit the ground. They form inside clouds where it’s very cold and windy.

Inside a storm cloud, water droplets get frozen into ice. These ice pieces then go up and down in the cloud many times. Each time they go up, more water freezes around them, kind of like adding layers to a snow globe. The more times they do this, the bigger they become.

Once they’re big enough and the storm is done, they fall from the sky. Sometimes they're so heavy that they can break windows or hurt people if they hit them, just like how a big rock can make a bigger splash in a pond than a small pebble.

So next time you see a big storm, imagine giant marbles falling from the sky, that's giant hailstones!