While keeping up with the daily shenanigans of rapper and actor Ludacris isn’t usually my top priority, I will admit that lately, the 46-year-old has been posting some pretty entertaining content. Recently, the artist sparked concern among fans after he shared a video of himself drinking water from a glacier in Alaska. While the water was definitely giving ‘fresh’, some netizens were worried that there might be something nasty lurking in the unfiltered water.
Ludacris first posted the video on his TikTok page with the clip quickly racking up an impressive 28 million views. In it, the rapper notes how half the world’s glaciers are in Alaska and that he couldn’t possibly visit without tasting “fresh, glacial water.”
The Fast 5 star can be seen dipping his bottle into the water and taking a sip before exclaiming “Oh my god” and running out of frame.
Immediately comments began rolling in, with several netizens warning Ludacris that glacier water is “very dangerous.” One user wrote: “Glacier water… has over a million bacteria that haven’t all been identified.” Another penned: “Pretty sure drinking water from a glacier is bad for your health lol.”
However, all my fellow Ludacris fans out there, there’s no reason to fret. Our favourite guy is not going to drop dead anytime soon. According to glaciologist Martin Truffer, “[Ludacris is] totally fine.” “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 expert explained.
Truffer also noted that while it’s not always safe to drink water from a stream in the wild, the specific water that Ludacris drank hadn’t had any exposure to biological activity: “There’s just really no concern on these glacial streams about safety. I’ve done this many, many times myself without ever having any issues.”
As previously mentioned, Alaska has the nation’s greatest concentration of glaciers: approximately 100,000 cover nearly 30,000 square miles.
Ludacris has a very big social media presence, with over 6 million followers on TikTok and over 19 million followers on Instagram. So, you can be sure that there will always be a whole community keeping a close watch over the rapper’s little adventures.