On Jan. 20, a man in Siberia went ice fishing and had himself a bad day. After drilling a hole in the ice over the Lena River, he accidentally dropped his new iPhone 7 Plus, and the magical device plunged straight into the freezing water below.
The iPhone remained underwater for 13 hours, until the fisherman’s friend, a diver named Fyodor, jumped into the water and retrieved it. When he returned the iPhone to its owner, it was still in perfect working order. When it fell down the hole, the phone only had about a 35-percent charge left on its battery. After more than half a day, the battery had only fallen to 19 percent.
The diver’s friends recorded his iPhone rescue, and he later shared a video of the stunt on Instagram, where the footage now has nearly 3,000 views.
Staff at the local website Ykt.ru decided to test these findings, suspicious that an iPhone can’t actually survive so long in freezing water.
Ykt.ru cut a hole through the five-foot-deep ice over the Lena River and lowered an iPhone 7 more than eight feet. They wrapped the phone in a net and tied it to a measuring tape. When they submerged it, the device had just 35 percent of its battery remaining.
After 13 hours, the team returned to the spot to retrieve the iPhone, only to find that the hole in the ice had closed up again, and the measuring tape had frozen solid. With some extra effort, however, they were eventually able to get back the iPhone, which, to everyone’s delight, still worked perfectly, and the battery had only dropped to 25 percent.
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