Solar eclipses have fascinated humans for thousands of years. While the natural phenomenon were once viewed as bad omens and portents of disaster, they’re now more likely to simply blind curious onlookers who ignore warnings against staring at them. Now, a group of death divers leveraged the majesty of an eclipse for their most recent stunt.
Death diving, also known as døds diving or dødsing, is a type of diving that involves leaping off a cliff, then curling into a pike at the last second in order to narrowly avoid a potentially deadly landing.
The project was organized by Norwegian lifestyle brand 00NATION, that previously put together a viral stunt in which death divers Truls Torp and Côme Girardot hurled themselves off a 65-foot-tall iceberg in Greenland.
This stunt was no less dangerous, but required an entirely different set of considerations from the Greeland jump. In addition to the logistics of finding an appropriate cliff to throw themselves off of, they also had to consider the visibility of the sun.
“It’s difficult,’ explained the group’s logistician Enzo Benezet. “The problem is the takeoff is really high and the sun is low. To have the sun align with the takeoff, we have to be above the takeoff. That was maybe not what we had in mind at first.”
To do that, they scouted numerous spots, found backups, and planned the entire thing to the second. In the end, though, it all came down to a leap of faith. Check out the full video below.
