ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Rapper and actor Chris “Ludacris” Bridges sent social media followers into a frenzy when he knelt on a glacier in Alaska, dipped an empty water bottle into a clear blue pool of water and drank it.
Video of Ridiculous tasting the glacier water and shouting, “Oh my God!” got millions of views on TikTok And InstagramSome viewers worried that he was endangering his life by drinking the untreated water, warning that the water could be contaminated with the parasite giardia.
But a glacier expert from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said the online fuss was “ridiculous.”
“He’s doing absolutely fine,” glaciologist Martin Truffer said Wednesday.
“It’s understandable that someone would be concerned about drinking untreated water, but if you drink water from a meltwater stream on a glacier, it’s about the cleanest water you’ll ever get.”
Ludacris donned ice boots to check off a bucket list item and walked across the Knik Glacier, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north of Anchorage, while in the nation’s largest state to perform at the Alaska State Fair on Friday. He was clearly pleased with the taste of the glacier water.
“I’m a water snob,” he said in a later video before a concert Tuesday in Minneapolis. “It was the best tasting water I’ve ever had in my life.”
Symptoms of giardiasis, the disease caused by giardia, include diarrhea, stomach cramps, and dehydration. It can spread from person to person or through contaminated water, food, surfaces, or objects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises people not to swallow water while swimming and to boil or filter water from lakes, springs, or rivers before drinking it to avoid getting sick.
The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation advises against drinking untreated surface water, spokeswoman Kelly Rawalt said in an email. It also released a flyer with safe drinking practices for outdoor enthusiasts, including adding chlorine or iodine to one-gallon containers of water and letting them sit for an hour before drinking.
Truffer, who admitted he only knew about Ludacris because his neighbor in Fairbanks named his cat after the rapper, said it’s not always safe to drink water from a wild stream. But he said the water Ludacris drank wasn’t exposed to any biological activity.
“There is simply no concern about safety in these glacial flows,” he said.
“I’ve done this many times myself without ever having any problems,” he said.
Alaska is home to about 100,000 glaciers, with the icy masses covering about 28,800 square miles (74,590 square kilometers) — or 3 percent of the state. That’s 128 times the area covered by glaciers in the other 49 states, according to the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.
For some visitors to Alaska, Seeing a glacier is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But climate change is taking its toll, and the Juneau Icefield melting acceleratesaccording to a study released last month. The area covered by snow is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s.
