flâneur

There’s someone on the ice - by Sam Kriss

samkriss.substack.com · 6,789 words · saved by 1 readers

A gasp from the bottom of the world

There’s someone on the ice. The ground in Greenland is full of gold. There’s diamonds in there, huge seams of copper and zinc, rare earth metals, the wealth of a small continent, and all of it is buried under an ice sheet two miles thick. You can’t build on the ice and you can’t dig through it either, because the ice is not static. Not glassy and smooth but jagged, rucked up everywhere with jostling peaks, and it flows: every part of the ice sheet is slowly spreading out of the centre of the island and into the sea. Any permanent structure you try to build there will end up on an iceberg,…

related reading