Last week, 50,000 people in and around Sydney, Australia were ordered to evacuate their homes as eight months’ worth of rain hit the region in a period of about four days. The magnitude of this flood prompted a TikTok conspiracy theory that the Australian government was controlling the weather via a process called cloud seeding.

Host Ethan Brown breaks down the process of cloud seeding and explains why it can’t really drive a flood, how climate change played into the storm’s severity, and the significance of the fact that the general public is talking about the weather in new (if inaccurate) ways in this week’s “Tip of the Iceberg.”

For more information, see the companion “Tip of the Iceberg” essay here.