And what causes them to suddenly drop all of that water in the form of rain.
Judging by the amount of rain they must weigh a ton.
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Ph.d Meteorology student here. Clouds are really just areas of our atmosphere that are “supersatured” with respect to liquid water (this can happen for ice too, depending on temperature). Think about when you get out of the shower, the room is foggy, and that’s because of a lot of water vapor entering the air through the faucet and that vapor is condensing onto aerosols in the air causing you to visually see it. This is a cloud, similar to those in the sky. Sure, the total liquid water content is a lot in real clouds, but they aren’t solid objects. They are just a bunch of liquid (or ice) droplets being suspended close together in proximity (like smoke).
These droplets are really good scatterers of visual light, so they appear white and solid to us in clouds, especially when far away. But take a plane ride, and you’ll see how (not solid?) clouds are.
When you say flat bottoms, you probably are talking about normal cumulus clouds or even cumulonimbus clouds (thunderstorms). They have flatter bottoms because these clouds form when air is unstable and rises up quickly (much like boiling water bubbles in a pot, this is called convection). As air rises, it cools and causes water vapor in the air to condense when the temperature cools to the dew point. The altitude at which this happens is called the lifted condensation level and it occurs at the same altitude on a given day in a given region (usually). So this level is like a boundsry where cloud begins to form in the upward moving air bubble, causing a stark, flat appearance.
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