Man catches moment baseball-sized hail with spikes falls in Texas

It might be the stuff of nightmares, but it turns out that baseball-sized hailstones are in fact a real thing.

Just excuse me while I go and purchase a medieval helmet for my trip to the shop.

As if scorching heat wasn't enough, it seems that massive hailstones are also now falling from the sky.

Not only are they the size of baseballs, they're also spiked. Best shut the windows.

A video taken in Texas shows the enormous hailstones hurtling down onto a neighbourhood while thunder and lightning roll. If anything looked apocalyptic, this certainly does.

The stones hit cars and pavements. Several even made sizeable dents into grass. One thing's for sure, you certainly wouldn't want to be out in it.

After the storm eased off, they rushed out to collect some of the stones which had fallen from the sky. They were huge.

Things can get bad enough when you have ball-bearing sized hail. If it catch you, it sting.

So the thought of a solid chunk of ice the size of a baseball falling from the sky is frankly terrifying.

The cameraman comments of the storm as the stones hit the ground, saying: "You could hear them being embedded into the ground as they fell down."

Wow. That's pretty terrifying.

TikTok / emyludesigns

You'd need more than a mackintosh and an umbrella to get through that.

The hailstones came about following a series of massive storms over Texas and Oklahoma in recent days. The storms have left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity.

Hail wasn't the worst of it either, as the extreme weather also saw a number of tornados sweeping through Mississippi, leaving one person dead.

Heat warnings have also been put in place with temperatures expected to reach over 37C, or 100F.

Hailstones are created by a process called accretion. They begin as a small core of ice in a thundercloud.

A warm updraft pushes the stone upwards through the cloud where it accrues more layers of ice. When the updraft cools, it falls back through the cloud again gaining more ice until it once again hits the updraft.

The process repeats until the stone is too heavy to be lifted by the updraft, at which point it falls to the ground.

While most thunderstorms will produce hail, the stones often melt into rain before they reach the ground.

So imagine just how powerful that updraft must have been to result in a hailstone the size of a baseball! It beggars belief really.

In fact, when the cameraman compares the hail to 'softball' size, this isn't just a comparison out of nowhere. It's actually a recognised measurement that meteorologists can use when talking about the size of hailstones.

These range from 1/4 inch stones, which are called 'pea-sized', to the 4.5 inch 'softball-sized'. Yikes.