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Sunol is an approach path for Airplanes to the major airports. This might have been what you experienced: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/18542 ... ice-rainedgiantbrookie wrote:The largest hail I ever experienced in the High Sierra was large pea sized at Shepherd Pass in 1996. The biggest I've ever seen requires an asterisk.
The largest hail, if you could call it that, was a chunk I saw hit the ground about 100 m in front of me in Sunol Regional Wilderness, eastern SF Bay Area in the spring of 2010 while I was returning to the parking lot after another day teaching my students geologic field mapping. The largest fragment remaining after it broke up upon hitting the ground was bigger than a softball. The original size was probably something around a basketball size. A direct hit would have caused serious bodily harm. The odd thing is that it wasn't raining at the time this thing fell out of the sky. It had in fact rained earlier in the day and it was overcast, but I was pretty shocked when I saw this big white thing fall out of the sky and blow up on the trail in front of me. I looked at the fragments and they appeared to be a conglomeration of smaller hailstones of pea size.
I did in fact consider that the block may have been airliner waste--this was what I initially thought when I saw this thing fall out of the sky. However if you look at photos of the stuff that has reached the ground from planes you see that it recrystallizes as a more solid block of glassy ice (see photo in your feature, for example), as you would expect. In contrast, the big block that fell and fragmented in front of me in Sunol RW was composed of innumerable hailstones stuck together. The photo I attached (late edit) is not too good because this was with my old 1600 x 1200 pixel camera, but I believe it is good enough to see that the internal texture of this ice is very different from frozen airplane waste.rlown wrote:Sunol is an approach path for Airplanes to the major airports. This might have been what you experienced: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/18542 ... ice-rained
Ok, not Sierra but i could see that happening over Yose as well as that is also a major airline highway.