Those fluffy clouds of summer floating against the blue sky may seem weightless but nope, they are enormously heavy.
The average cumulus cloud contains about 131,894 gallons of water. Water weights 8.34 pounds per gallon. That means the average cloud weighs 1.1 million pounds, according to Useless Knowledge.
So if you have a legion of tanks above your head, how do they stay up there? They float because they are made of minuscule droplets so tiny that it takes more than a million to make a single raindrop.
But these billowing clouds also have a lot of power. The tops fluff into cotton-like towers, but the bottom of the cloud is flat. You don't want to be a paraglider under the base of a cumulus cloud. Thermal updrafts under the cloud can lift an airplane thousands of feet in seconds.
