Tundra Tongue: The Science Behind a Very Cold Mistake
hubie writes:
You've done it too, haven't you? Or maybe you know someone who has? Stuck their tongue to a piece of frozen metal in the winter, even though they know it's cold? But is it dangerous?
Touching your tongue to frozen metal must be a rite of passage if you're a five-year-old boy from a cold place. It's possibly more irresistible than hopping in mud puddles or sampling a newly frosted cake. But it is dangerous?
Anders Hagen Jarmund knows all about this particular temptation. Yes, he's gotten his tongue stuck.
[...] "This was an experience that my friends had also had, actually, and then we were wondering if it was actually dangerous, getting your tongue stuck to a lamppost or railing," he said.
In fact, in Norway, at least, the government was concerned enough about the problem to pass regulations in 1998 prohibiting bare metal in playground equipment.
So he and a group of friends who were also researchers decided to find the answer to their question: is getting your tongue frozen to cold metal dangerous?
The short answer is that most of the time, licking a piece of frozen metal is probably not going to result in serious harm.
You'll want to warm the metal where the tongue is stuck to loosen it, maybe by breathing on the metal or using a little warm water.
Whatever you do, however, do not yank the tongue off, Jarmund says.
[...] This is not just idyll speculation. Jarmund and his friends have recently published two academic articles about the problem in peer-reviewed medical journals. And one way they found their answers involved pig tongues.
[...] As best they could tell, there was nothing in the medical literature that assessed the true danger of actually freezing your tongue to frigidly cold metal.
So, in the spirit of true scientific explorers, they decided to fill this particular knowledge gap. Their quest would involve two important tools, one conventional, one less so: a literature review, and the aforementioned pig tongues.
First, Jarmund and his colleagues conducted a thorough review of Scandinavian newspapers since 1748 for stories of people freezing their tongues to cold metal. They found the first report in 1845.
[...] And they found a scientific study that gave the experience a name: Tundra tongue.
[...] In the end, what the researchers found was that most cases of tundra tongue had no or mild consequences.
But fully 18 per cent of the cases they found resulted in visits to a doctor or hospital to deal with problems like avulsion. That's the clinical way to describe a piece of your tongue getting torn off, such as when yanking it off a frozen piece of metal.
[...] They found, not surprisingly, if you apply pig tongues to a frozen section of a metal lamppost, they will stick, and quite well.
In fact, in 54 per cent of the experiments, parts of the tongue were torn. The harder they pulled, the greater the likelihood that a piece of the tongue would get torn off.
The greatest risk of having a piece of your tongue torn off, their experiments showed, was when temperatures were between -5 and -15 C.
There was a surprise, however: when they tested the pig tongues on very cold metal, there was less chance of avulsion.
They don't know exactly why, but they think it's because the tongue freezes hard enough so it can resist being torn when yanked free from the icy grip of frozen metal.
Journal References:
Jarmund, Anders Hagen; Tollefsen, Sofie Eline; Sakshaug, Baard Cristoffer; et al. (2026) Demography and outcomes of frozen tongue: a scoping review of Scandinavian tundra tongue cases. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijporl.2026.112740
Jarmund, Anders Hagen; Jarmund, Stale Hagen; Tollefsen, Sofie Eline et al. (2026) The trauma of the tundra tongue: an experimental and computational study of lingual tissue damage following adhesion to a cold metal lamp post. Head & Face Medicine https://doi.org/10.1186/s13005-025-00581-y
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