There’s someone on the ice - by Sam Kriss

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, dissolving in the Atlantic. If you try to dig through the ice and into the mineral-rich rock beneath, three trillion tons of creaking, patient ice will crush your borehole and snap your drills like matchsticks. The ice is empty. Animals don’t go there. There’s nothing to eat, this far from the sea, where the ground never thaws. Not even rocks to nuzzle for lichen. Some ice worms that scrub the red algae off the glaciers, but nothing desperate enough to feed on them. Humans don’t go there either. A few scientific research stations that sprout up for three months before being dismantled again. The US military built a base on the ice once to store their missiles, but they felt the ground moving, closing around their silos, ready to pop the nuclear warheads like bubble wrap, and the base was abandoned. A few explorers and adventurers are buried in there, slowly crushed between groaning walls of ice. All of Greenland’s original settlements are on the thin rind of exposed rock around the edge. You can fish there. For a few months in the summer you can grow potatoes in the thin acidic soil. No one lives on the ice. But there’s someone on the ice.

The first documented encounter with the icedwellers was filmed by Jaxon Flores, an American settler, just outside his homestead above Qikangittuqaqquti on the edge of the ice. Flores had, like half a million Americans, moved to the new unincorporated federal territory of Greenland under the Second Frontier programme. Footage captured from his livestream shows Flores on the ice. It’s night; it’s been night for weeks. He’s standing in front of a ring light, and the crags and spears of ice behind him glow semitransparent, like a world of jagged glass. Flores wears a black parka and repeatedly hits a vape pen as he talks to his phone. STOP BEING GAY, he says. Literally bro just stop being gay, he says, I literally don’t know how else to put it, you are gay. Your ancestors, your ancestors—he sucks on the vape—your ancestors carved a society out of the wilderness. Your ancestors were men. They went to the desert and tamed it, they fought savage tribes, they fought literal fuckin demons to build the modern world. They reaped the fruits of civilisation because they’d earned it. How do you think your ancestors would feel to see you eating processed slop and fapping to pornography? If you’re not already in Greenland, if you’re still in Fake America—a huge cloud of vapour freezing to tiny crystals as he exhales—you’re not gonna make it bro. Here he spreads his arms wide at the black desert around him. There’s no laws! he shouted. No laws here, no taxes, it’s just men, real men, building a new society in Hyperborea. You could be minting crypto here bro, you could be running cams, you could be doing shit that would get you a fucking jail sentence in Fake America. Right now I’m building generational wealth. In like sixty years when the ice melts and they find gold my great grandkids will be trillionaires. I did that. And instead you’re saving for a down payment for a studio in Miami to party with females, because you—and here Flores leans in close to the camera until you can see the ice glittering in his eyelashes—are gay.

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