Scientists Say Ludacris’ Sip of Raw Alaskan Ice Was Totally Fine

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Rapper-turned-actor Chris “Ludacris” Bridges raised concerns amongst some social media followers when he knelt on an Alaskan glacier, dipped an empty water bottle right into a blue, crystal-clear body of water and drank it.

A video of Ludacris tasting the icy water and exclaiming “Oh my God!” has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Instagram, with some viewers expressing concerns that he was putting his life in danger by drinking untreated water, warning it may very well be contaminated with the parasite giardia.

But a glacier expert on the University of Alaska in Fairbanks said the web furor “was absurd.”

“He’s fine,” glaciologist Martin Truffer said Wednesday.

“You can understand that someone might be concerned about drinking unpurified water, but if you’re drinking water from a melting glacier, that’s the purest water you’ll ever get.”

Ludacris donned ice-walking spikes to finish a bucket-list item and hike the Knik Glacier, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north of Anchorage, while within the nation’s largest state to perform on 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. “That was the best water I’ve ever had.”

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Symptoms of giardiasis, the disease brought on by giardia, include diarrhea, stomach cramps, and dehydration. It can spread from individual to individual or through contaminated water, food, surfaces, or objects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends avoiding swallowing water while swimming and boiling or filtering water from lakes, springs, or rivers before drinking it to stop illness.

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation doesn’t recommend drinking untreated surface water, spokeswoman Kelly Rawalt said in an email. It also has developed a pamphlet with secure drinking practices for outdoor enthusiasts, including adding chlorine or iodine to quart-sized water containers and letting them sit for an hour before drinking.

Truffer, who admitted he only knew Ludacris because his Fairbanks neighbor named his cat after the rapper, said it’s not all the time secure to drink water from a stream within the wild. But he said the water Ludacris drank wasn’t exposed to any biological activity.

“There are really no safety concerns on these glacial streams,” he said.

“I’ve done it many, many times and never had any problems,” he said.

Alaska has about 100,000 glaciers, and the ice covers about 28,800 square miles (74,590 square kilometers) — or 3 percent of the state’s land area. That’s 128 times greater than the realm covered by glaciers in the opposite 49 states, based on 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 melting of the Juneau Icefield is accelerating, based on a study published last month. The snow-covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it did within the Nineteen Eighties.