What if Chile rations water at its biggest copper mines?
Atacama drought cutting Escondida/Collahuasi output is a copper-supply shock — the clean move is copper and Freeport higher; the wheat/corn/food-CPI legs in the cascade are a generic climate-shock contaminant that doesn't belong in a Chilean mining-water event. Rhymes with the 2021-22 Chilean drought curtailments that tightened concentrate and the 2025 Grasberg halt. Forward angle: desal capex lags demand, so water is now a recurring structural constraint on Chilean supply, not a one-off — a slow bullish drip rather than a spike.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Atacama drought forces Escondida and Collahuasi to slash output as desalination capacity lags mining water demand. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Copper ▲ · Climate/crop supply ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.