What if a catastrophic flood halts Zambia's Mufulira copper mine?
A Mufulira inrush halts Zambian copper-cobalt (~4% of mine copper, major cobalt), so the clean trade is long copper and a cobalt-price pop, with Freeport as proxy beta. This rhymes with the Sep-2025 Grasberg mud-rush that tightened concentrate and lifted copper. Transmission runs through China/DRC supply chains and Glencore's cobalt book. Modest size, but stacked on Grasberg it keeps the concentrate market in deficit; cobalt is the cleaner asymmetric upside than the muted copper read shown.
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. A catastrophic inrush floods Mopani's Mufulira shaft, killing miners and halting Zambian copper-cobalt output. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.