A hailstone is a small ball of ice that falls from the sky during certain thunderstorms. Unlike snowflakes, which are delicate and feathery, hailstones are solid chunks of ice that form when raindrops get caught in powerful updrafts inside storm clouds and freeze. Each time a frozen drop gets swept back up into the coldest part of the cloud, it collects another layer of ice, like dipping a candy apple repeatedly in coating. Eventually the hailstone becomes too heavy for the wind to hold up, and it plummets to the ground.

Hailstones can be as small as peas or as large as baseballs (or larger), and they can fall fast enough to dent cars, break windows, and damage crops. When a hailstorm passes through farmland during the growing season, it can destroy an entire harvest in minutes. That's why farmers and weather forecasters take hail seriously.

If you slice a large hailstone in half, you can see rings inside, like the rings in a tree trunk, showing how many times it cycled up and down through the storm cloud before finally falling. Each layer tells the story of that hailstone's wild journey through the sky.