* * *

Kiruna’s move—three kilometers east, street by street, over 17 painstaking years—owes to the same thing that caused the town to spring up in the first place: a seam of iron ore that currently provides 90 percent of the iron for all of Europe, at a rate of more than six Eiffel Towers’ worth a day. More than a century after mining began, nobody knows quite how deep the seam runs. What is known is that the ore lies at an angle. For more than a century, the Luossovaara-Kiirunavaara mine has not just been getting deeper; its underground detonations have been shifting laterally, exploding rock into the gaps left behind by the extracted iron, and causing cracks to appear on the surface above. In recent years, those ominous fissures have been edging ever closer to the town.

Kiruna is, quite literally, being undermined. The mine isn’t going anywhere, so the town has to.

Recently, I visited Kiruna to see the mine and the town it would reposition. Knowing that the sun will still be up at midnight, spending your day in the depths of a mine makes more sense than it might a few parallels south. A tour of the mine lasts almost three hours. Some people on the tour were worried about claustrophobia, and as we rode a bus down the narrow, pitch-dark tunnels into the mine’s bowels, the worry seemed well founded. But as we reached a depth of 540 meters, the roadway opened into a cavernous space lit with the dull glare of a midnight hospital. There was a cafe, and a visitors’ center, and a tour guide about to repeat the same 5,000-odd words for what might be the 5,000th time.

All the numbers she shared are big: the number of years since the first spade struck rock, the number of trains that ferry the iron to the ports of Narvik and Luleå, the number of miles those trains travel, and the number of wagons hitched up behind them. The lengths are big, and the heights, and the widths, and the depths. Above all, the volume: the sheer mass of material that is blown out of this underground in any given unit of time.

We were shown the living conditions of the very first miners. We were walked through the crushing and grinding processes, after which the iron is spit into the sunlight. We were given coffee. Through a muddied convex sheet of safety glass, I saw some anonymous detritus being catapulted down a shaft. In what must be one of the world’s deepest-lying cinemas, we were shown what seems suspiciously like a promotional video aimed at prospective investors. Finally, we were each given a parting gift: a small plastic bag filled with tiny balls of iron.

One the way back to the center of Kiruna, the atmosphere on the bus was subdued. Maybe people were tired. But I think were all recovering from those numbers, too, pondering them as one ponders the stars. Kiruna never looked like a large place, but it now somehow looked small enough to move.