Chris “Ludacris” Bridges caused concern among some followers on social media when he knelt down on a glacier in Alaska, dipped an empty water bottle into a blue, pristine pool of water and drank it.

The rapper and actor’s video of him tasting the glacier water and shouting “Oh my God!” has been viewed millions of times on TikTok and Instagram. Some viewers expressed fears that he was putting his life at risk by drinking the untreated water and warned that it could be contaminated with the parasite Giardia.

However, a glacier expert at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks said the internet fuss was “ridiculous.”

“He is doing perfectly well,” said glaciologist Martin Truffer on Wednesday.

“It’s understandable that some people have concerns about drinking untreated water. But if you drink water from a glacier meltwater stream, it’s pretty much the cleanest water you’re ever going to get.”

Ludacris donned ice crampons to check off a bucket list item to climb the Knik Glacier, about 40 miles north of Anchorage, while in the country’s largest state to perform at the Alaska State Fair on Friday. He was clearly drawn to the taste of the glacier water.

“I’m a water snob,” he said in a later video before a concert in Minneapolis on Tuesday. “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. The disease can be spread from person to person or through contaminated water, food, surfaces or objects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends not swallowing water while swimming and boiling or filtering water from lakes, springs or rivers before drinking to prevent illness.

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

Truffer, who admitted he only knew Ludacris because his neighbor in Fairbanks named his cat after the rapper, said it is not always safe to drink water from a stream in the wild. However, he said the water Ludacris drank was not exposed to any biological activity.

“There are simply no concerns about the safety of these glacial streams,” he said.

“I have done this myself many, many times without ever having any problems,” he said.

Alaska is home to about 100,000 glaciers, covering about 29,000 square miles (74,590 km²), or 3% of the state. According to the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, that’s 128 times the glacier area of ​​the other 49 states.

For some visitors to Alaska, seeing a glacier is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But the climate crisis is taking its toll, and the melting of the Juneau Icefield is accelerating, a study published last month shows. The snow-covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than in the 1980s.