MOLINE, Ill — Perhaps one of the strangest appearing things in the sky you'll ever witness, this unique cloud formation comes in different sizes and shapes. It is, however, usually caused by the same set of circumstances.
I give you, the 'hole-punch' or 'fallstreak' cloud. News 8's own Jonathan Fong stumbled upon a Reddit post recently featuring this type of cloud formation and asked about its origins. Is someone punching up through the sky or is the sky simply falling toward us? Let's dig in!
Yes, the sky is falling...kinda
Was Chicken Little really onto something here? Perhaps, but in reality, it is simply a part of the cloud that is falling out of the sky.
A fallstreak hole occurs when a layer of mid-level clouds, like altocumulus clouds, gets disturbed by either warmer pockets of air beneath the cloud, or an object punching through them, like an airplane.
Their appearance will grab your attention. Once disturbed, by either an airplane or some other disturbance in the atmosphere, the ice crystals will fall through warmer pockets of air just below the cloud, causing them to evaporate and creating the clear hole that we see from the ground.
This cloud layer usually contains supercooled water droplets that are looking for a reason to freeze, which usually come in the form of ice crystals. Airplanes passing through this cloud layer often bring those ice crystals.
Once introduced, the water droplets quickly freeze, grow, and start to fall, leaving a hole behind. The hole will eventually expand outward as other supercooled droplets nearby freeze.
Hole-punch clouds can vary in size and shape, from small gaps to much larger clearings that can span several miles. The rate at which the ice crystals fall also determines the size of the hole formation.
You will often see the crystals fall through the sky before they evaporate above the ground, giving the cloud a tail-like appearance.
So, no need to worry! The sky isn't falling after all! Just some previously supercooled water droplets turned into ice crystals that have become a bit too heavy to sustain in the air.
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