Experiments Reveal the Real Danger of Tundra Tongue — Tongues Frozen to Metal

For generations of kids growing up in cold climates, licking a frozen lamppost has been a dare, a joke, or a mistake waiting to happen. The scene is famously immortalized in the holiday movie A Christmas Story, when a boy’s tongue gets stuck to a frozen pole.

But how dangerous is it, really? A group of Norwegian researchers decided to find out.

In two recent studies published in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology and the Journal of Head & Face Medicine, the team investigated what happens when a tongue freezes to metal, reviewing historical cases and running their own unusual experiments to measure just how strong that icy bond can be. Their conclusion: most cases don’t cause serious harm, but pulling a tongue free too quickly can sometimes tear the tissue.

“We were curious, of course, and no one has studied this,” lead author Anders Hagen Jarmund said in a press release. “We wanted to do something systematically. That’s what research is about. It was also a little bit for us to learn how to do this type of research.”

Read More: The Mystery of Losing Your Taste From Long COVID May Finally Have an Answer

Investigating the Frequency of Tongues Freezing to Metal

Before heading into the lab, the researchers wanted to know how often the problem had actually happened in real life.

To find out, they combed through centuries of Scandinavian newspaper archives looking for reports of people freezing their tongues to cold metal objects. The search produced more than 17,000 results, which the team narrowed down to 113 documented cases dating back as far as 1845.

Medical researchers even have a name for the mishap: “tundra tongue.”

The most common age for the accident was five years old, and roughly 60 percent of the incidents involved boys.

Most of the reports described only mild consequences. But in about 18 percent of cases, the incident resulted in a visit to a doctor or hospital, usually because the tongue tissue tore when someone tried to yank it free.

Putting Frozen Tongues to the Test

To better understand how firmly a tongue can freeze to metal, the researchers conducted controlled experiments.

Considering the use of human volunteers was out of the question, the team used pig tongues, which are structurally similar to human ones.

They obtained 84 tongues from a slaughterhouse and set up a series of experiments using chilled metal surfaces, sensors, and an infrared camera. The goal was to measure how strongly the tongue adhered to the metal at different temperatures and how much force it took to pull it free.

The experiments confirmed that tongues stick to frozen metal very well. In fact, when researchers pulled the tongues free, pieces of tissue tore away in more than half of the tests.

The Real Danger Comes From Panic

The risk of tearing, known medically as avulsion, turned out to depend heavily on temperature.

The researchers found the greatest chance of injury when the metal was between 23 °F (–5°C) and 5 °F (–15°C), temperatures common during winter in many northern regions.

Surprisingly, extremely cold conditions sometimes reduced the risk of tearing. The team suspects that when the tongue freezes more completely, the tissue may become stiff enough to resist ripping when it is pulled free.

But regardless of the temperature, the biggest danger came from panic.

“Try not to panic,” Jarmund said. “I remember the panic, you’re standing there, and your tongue is stuck to metal. But above all else: Don’t pull your tongue off too fast.”

Instead, the safest solution is to warm the metal slowly, either by breathing on it or pouring warm water over the area until the ice bond loosens.

In other words, if curiosity, or a childhood dare, ever leads to a frozen tongue, patience may be the best medicine.

Read More: Slingshot Tongues of Chameleons and Salamanders Could Transform Tech in Medicine and Space

Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article: