Ludacris' gulp of untreated Alaska glacier melt was fine

ANCHORAGE, Alaska

Rapper-turned-actor Chris “Ludacris” Bridges sparked concern from some social media followers when he knelt on an Alaska glacier, dipped an empty water bottle into a blue, pristine pool of water and drank it.

Video of Ludacris tasting the glacial water and proclaiming, “Oh my God!" got millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. Some viewers expressed concern that he was endangering his life by drinking the untreated water, warning it might be contaminated with the parasite giardia.

But an expert on glaciers from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks said the online brouhaha “was ludicrous.”

“He’s totally fine,” glaciologist Martin Truffer said on Aug. 28.

“It’s sort of understandable that somebody would be concerned about just drinking untreated water, but if you drink water from a melt stream on a glacier, that’s about the cleanest water you’ll ever get.”

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation does not recommend drinking untreated surface water, spokeperson Kelly Rawalt said in an email. It also has produced a flyer with safe drinking practices for outdoor enthusiasts, including adding chlorine or iodine to quart-size water containers and letting them sit an hour before drinking.

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. According to the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, that’s 128 times the area covered by glaciers in the other 49 states.

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 Juneau’s icefield is accelerating , according to a study that came out last month. The snow-covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s.