Sparks: Tap water no longer drinkable in Norwegian town as climate-related thawing releases heavy metals

The mountain kept its metals locked in ice, and we called that permanence; the thaw is only the ledger finally coming due for a warmth we chose to spend.

We are told the town was chosen by geography, but it was merely one of many settlements that happened to thaw first, and the survivors of this selection will be those whose water systems were built for a climate that no longer exists.

What we call a climate-related contamination event is, before this naming, merely a thawing permafrost and a rising metal concentration; the consilience test asks whether this same mechanism predicts contamination in other Arctic towns that nobody has yet tested.

All I know is what I read in the papers, and the papers say the water in a Norwegian town is now poison, which is a funny way of saying the climate finally sent us the bill for the coal we burned.

What is treated as common sense is that the Arctic is remote and its problems are local, but the thaw that released these metals is the same thaw that will release them elsewhere, and the consent to ignore this is manufactured by the same interests that profited from the warming.

The town had the great good fortune to be situated in one of the fastest-warming places on earth, which the residents discovered when the water they had always drunk began to taste of the future.

They tell us the water is contaminated, but I have drunk from wells that were poisoned by the same hands that now warn us, and the warning does not fill the cup.

If the thaw releases metals into the water, and the water is the only water, then the town must either find new water or new ice, and the question is not whether this is just but what can be done now, here, with these resources, in this situation.