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

For generations of children growing up in cold climates, licking a frozen lamp post has been a challenge, a joke, or a mistake waiting to happen. The scene is immortalized in the holiday film A Christmas storywhen 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 Otolaryngology and the Diary of Head and facial medicineThe team studied what happens when a tongue turns to metal, examining historical cases and conducting their own unusual experiments to measure the strength of this icy bond. Their conclusion: Most cases don’t cause serious damage, but removing a tongue too quickly can sometimes tear 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 in a systematic way. That’s what research is. It was also a little bit for us to learn how to do this type of research.”

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Survey on the frequency of tongues freezing to metal

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

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

Medical researchers even have a name for this accident: “tundra tongue”.

The most common age of accidents was five years old and around 60 percent of incidents involved boys.

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

Putting frozen tongues to the test

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

Considering that using human volunteers was out of the question, the team used pig tongues, which are similar in structure to humans.

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 tightly the tongue sticks to the metal at different temperatures and how much force it takes to release it.

Experiments confirmed that the tongues adhere very well to frozen metal. In fact, when researchers released the tongues, pieces of tissue tore off in more than half of the tests.

The real danger comes from panic

The risk of tearing, medically called avulsion, has been shown to be highly temperature dependent.

The researchers found that the risk of injury was highest when the metal was between –5°C (23°F) and –15°C (5°F), temperatures common in 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 tearing when released.

But whatever the temperature, the greatest danger came from panic.

“Try not to panic,” Jarmund said. “I remember the panic, you’re there, and your tongue is stuck to the metal. But above all: don’t stick your tongue out too quickly.”

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

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

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