To get the “impossible shot” – a bird’s-eye view of a Great White launching an attack from below – Andy Casagrande and his team headed to an area in the vicinity of Gansbaai, in the Western Cape, that has a healthy Great White population.

It’s been a shot that has evaded wildlife cameramen – the bird’s-eye view of a Polaris Attack – until now.

The film crew used a high-tech camera called a Phantom (capable of shooting at speeds of up to one million frames per second) to capture it.

So just how did they do this?

They hung the camera from a helium-filled balloon, about 15 metres above the surface of the ocean, dragged a decoy Cape fur seal behind their boat, and then they waited for many hours and weeks as they stared at nothing.

And then it happened.

On top of offering a new insight into the way a Great White attacks from below, the footage will allow scientists to calculate how much time seals have to react to a Great White breaching during a Polaris Attack. The attack takes place within a second, and it’s estimated that seals avoid these types of attacks roughly 50 per cent of the time.

Scientists are already saying that the white underbelly (that appears as a teal colour under the conditions in which this sequence was shot) may tip seals off and alert them to an imminent attack, thus allowing them that vital split second to react.

Here’s the footage:

[Source: Discovery]