TikTok user Jason Clark, who has over 419,000 followers, posted a video Monday of his attempt to swim under the ice on a frozen body of water. Clark tried to enter and exit the ice through the same small hole but got trapped underneath the ice while a woman filmed him, the video shows.
“Never been this close to dying,” Clark posted with the TikTok video. “This is hard for me to watch.”
More than 2 million people have watched the video of the man struggle to emerge from the water.
Clark spoke about the incident in an Instagram post.
He said that he couldn’t tell the difference from the surface of the water in the hole from the bottom of the ice. After struggling to find it, he attempted to break the ice with his back, but it didn’t work.
“I was so short on breath I couldn’t really see anymore,” he said. “I had accepted that was it and I wasn’t going to make it.”
Clark eventually found the hole and can be heard telling Abby Mcdonald, who was behind the camera, that he “almost died.”
“She genuinely thought it was another one of my jokes and didn’t recognize the severity of the situation,” Clark wrote on Instagram.