Spotting a bulky shark gliding slowly over a desolate, deep-sea floor where sunlight never reaches was an unexpected discovery.
Until now, many specialists believed that sharks didn’t inhabit the icy waters surrounding Antarctica. However, this perception shifted when a sleeper shark made a cautious and brief appearance in front of a video camera, as noted by researcher Alan Jamieson this week. Captured on film in January 2025, the shark was a formidable creature, measuring between 10 and 13 feet in length.
“We ventured down there not anticipating any shark sightings since the prevailing assumption is that Antarctica is shark-free,” Jamieson explained.
“And what we found was no small fry. It’s a sizable shark—these creatures are built like tanks,” he remarked.
The footage was recorded by equipment from the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, which explores the mysteries of the world’s deepest oceans. The camera was situated near the South Shetland Islands, close to the Antarctic Peninsula.
This location falls well within the Antarctic Ocean, also referred to as the Southern Ocean, defined by areas south of the 60-degree latitude line.
The center on Wednesday gave The Associated Press permission to publish the images.
The shark was 1,608 feet deep where the water temperature was a near-freezing 34.29 degrees.
A skate appears in frame motionless on the seabed and seemingly unperturbed by the passing shark. The skate, a shark relative that looks like a stingray, was no surprise since scientists already knew their range extended that far south.
Jamieson, who is the founding director of the University of Western Australia-based research center, said he could find no record of another shark found in the Antarctic Ocean.
Peter Kyne, a Charles Darwin University conservation biologist independent of the research center, agreed that a shark had never before been recorded so far south.
Climate change and warming oceans could potentially be driving sharks to the Southern Hemisphere’s colder waters, but there was limited data on range changes near Antarctica because of the region’s remoteness, Kyne said.
The slow-moving sleeper sharks could have long been in Antarctica without anyone noticing, he said.
“This is great. The shark was in the right place, the camera was in the right place and they got this great footage,” Kyne said. “It’s quite significant.”
The sleeper shark population in the Antarctic Ocean was likely sparse and difficult for humans to detect, Jamieson said.
The photographed shark was maintaining a depth of around 1,640 feet along a seabed that sloped into much deeper water.
The shark maintained that depth because that was the warmest layer of several water layers stacked upon each other to the surface, Jamieson said.
The Antarctic Ocean is heavily layered, or stratified, to a depth of around 3,280 feet because of conflicting properties including colder, denser water from below not readily mixing with fresh water running off melting ice from above.
Jamieson expects other Antarctic sharks live at the same depth, feeding on the carcasses of whales, giant squids and other marine creatures that die and sink to the bottom.
There are few research cameras positioned at that specific depth in Antarctic waters. Those that are can only operate during the Southern Hemisphere summer months, from December through February.
“The other 75% of the year, no one’s looking at all. And so this is why, I think, we occasionally come across these surprises,” Jamieson said.
