What if the West Antarctic ice shelf collapses?
Thwaites collapse is a slow repricing of coastal real estate and the insurance/muni complex, not a grain story — the modeled wheat/corn leg is the wrong channel. The honest trade is widening of coastal-CAT reinsurance and Florida/Gulf muni spreads over years. Rhymes loosely with the post-Katrina (2005) reinsurance hardening, but multi-meter SLR is a structural insurability cliff with no clean historical analogue; price it as a persistent risk premium, not a shock.
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 3–10 years 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 risk-off shock. Thwaites ice shelf disintegrates abruptly, locking in multi-meter sea-level rise and repricing all coastal real estate. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Climate/crop supply ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.