In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, a scientist invents ice-nine, which is capable of freezing all the water on Earth. Of course it gets released, and apocalypse ensues. The ocean turns into a blue-white pearl under a darkening sun. Tornadoes fill the sky like worms. “The earth was locked up tight,” Vonnegut writes. “It was winter, now and forever.”
It’s a stark warning against monkeying with nature and, it turns out, Vonnegut was inspired by real life. In the 1940s, he worked as a publicist for General Electric alongside his brother, Bernie, a scientist. As part of a research team headed by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir, Bernie Vonnegut helped invent cloud seeding, a process of using chemicals to stimulate rain. An aerosol—usually silver iodide—is released into a would-be storm cloud. Water droplets cluster around the tiny crystalline particles, growing heavier and eventually falling as rain or snow.
While Kurt Vonnegut worried about the implications of this untested technology, others rushed to adopt it, including some organizations in California. Pacific Gas and Electric has used cloud seeding since the 1950s to increase the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Today, districts from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara to Sacramento cloud seed to increase rainfall.
I was fascinated to learn about cloud seeding. Making it rain seems at once the oldest of human fantasies and utterly futuristic, yet apparently it has been going on for decades. I probably wasn’t alone in my surprise. Until recently, cloud seeding was mostly out of public consciousness, either forgotten or sidelined into a category of science that seems slightly musty and
