Using suction cups, marine biologists recently attached 30 cameras to minke whales swimming through icy Antarctic waters.

The vivid footage — which aims to improve researchers' understanding of how the little-known Antarctic minke whales live — shows the mammals swimming beneath icy seas and coming up for air. .

“It's unique in that we've never been able to measure this kind of an environmental feature from the animal's perspective,” Ari Friedlaender, an ecologist at the University of California Santa Cruz who headed the mission, said in a statement. .