Every night, sometime between 1 and 2 a.m., everyone in Kiruna feels it, right on schedule: a deep, rhythmic rumbling that reverberates through their floors, shaking their walls and their beds.

Kiruna sits high up in the Swedish Arctic, a starkly beautiful place, surrounded by primeval forests, powerful rivers and rugged mountains. More than a century ago, industrialists named it “the land of the future” because of the rich seams of iron ore that lay beneath the earth. But today, mining has carved out so much of the land that it’s causing deeper, tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust. Unlike the timed nightly rumblings from the mine, these are real seismic tremors that shake the town’s foundations without warning. It is as if Kiruna’s mountain, woken from its slumber, is trying to settle itself. 

Carina Sarri, 73, can barely recognize the landscape today — it has changed so much since her childhood. The Kiruna native now lives in the south of Sweden, but recently returned for a visit.

“Two, three new mountains they have built, from the remains of the mine,” she said, describing the enormous piles of waste rock the miners have dumped, forming artificial mountains that dominate the skyline to the south of the city. She told me about the lake, once a treasured summer spot for swimming and fishing brown trout. The Swedish state-owned mining company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag or LKAB, began draining the southern end away about a decade ago to stop water seeping into the mine. Now people are afraid that what remains is too contaminated to swim in, and the brown trout have become scarce.

Sarri is of Sami origin, a group that is indigenous to the region. Now retired, she helped found Sweden’s first Sami-language nursery school in Kiruna in the 1980s. Sarri told me she couldn’t help but think about how her hometown might look a century from now when there is nothing left to extract. “How will they leave this land?” she wondered aloud.