Experiment reveals ‘startling’ discovery about the water that drips into New York City subways

Living in New York and taking the subway, it’s likely you’ve heard someone say: “Watch out for the drip above.” The liquid that falls on your face and fills the dents in the platforms seems gross when it touches you, but what’s actually in that water?

Curbed teamed up with a professor to decipher the exact contents of the mysterious subway drips, and it’s not what you would think.

In a 26 July Instagram post, Curbed published their recent experiment findings, titled, “What’s in the subway water that drips on your head?” with Benjamin Bostick, a research professor for Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the outlet’s own reporter Clio Chang. The two worked together in May to collect samples of the unknown liquid from three different subway stops: “The Fulton 4, the Chambers J, and the Hoyt 2/3.” A few months later, the results proved to be “more interesting” than the researchers initially thought.

“The result was startling: The water dropping on us is actually not that gross,” Curbed wrote. According to Bostick, “it’s pretty clean - it’s very fresh water that is clearly moving through whatever is above the subway pretty quickly.”

Contrary to what Bostick initially thought, the subway drips mostly consist of “trace metals,” including zinc, lead, sulfate, and calcium. While the liquid can appear murky and discoloured, results proved it was basically “pristine water”. As for the puddles that tend to sit within the cracks of the subway floor, a higher concentration of trace metals was found. Chang and Bostick assumed the concentration difference was apparent because the puddles had been sitting there longer.

“According to their incredibly small, somewhat arbitrary sample, most of what was dripping on us in these stations was basically just rain,” Curbed’s post concluded.

Viewers were not only skeptical, but reluctant to know what the underground water contained. “As a fellow chemist I get why he focused on minerals and chemical analysis but uhhh I wouldn’t call any mystery water ‘pristine’ without SOME kind of data on microbial contamination,” one person commented, while another viewer said: “I’m willing to live the rest of my life not knowing.”

“You know, sometimes ignorance really is bliss,” someone else joked.

However, at least one individual was grateful for the research. “I’ve been hoping NY Mag would do this story for 15 years! I call them ‘subway stalactites.’”

“The recovering germaphobe in me just exhaled deep surprising relief,” another viewer admitted.

According to someone else, they don’t actually “care” what’s in the water, just that it’s “sticky”.

“I don’t care. All I know is it’s sticky,” they wrote.

Curbed launched in 2004 as a one-stop-shop to all things city-dwellers would find interesting from urban building to design and informational studies. In 2013, the outlet joined Vox Media and was put under the New York umbrella six years later in 2019.