Scientists have recorded the first-ever video footage of a shark swimming in the freezing waters near Antarctica, challenging the long-standing belief that sharks could not survive in such extreme conditions. The discovery has reshaped current understanding of marine life in one of the planet’s most hostile environments.
The unexpected encounter took place in January 2025, when a remotely operated camera from the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre witnessed a sleeper shark estimated at 3-4 meters (10-13 feet) in length off the South Shetland Islands near the Antarctic Peninsula.
“We went down there not expecting to see sharks because there’s a general rule of thumb that you don’t get sharks in Antarctica," said researcher Alan Jamieson, who was part of the team. “It’s not even a little one either. It’s a hunk of a shark. These things are tanks," he told The Associated Press.
The shark was 490 meters (1,608 feet) deep, where the water temperature was a near-freezing 1.27 degrees Celsius, according to the AP report. A skate, a shark relative that looks like a stingray, appeared in frame motionless on the barren seabed and seemingly unperturbed by the passing shark.
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. Jamieson said there was no record of another shark in the Antarctic Ocean.
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, according to Kyne. He said the slow-moving sleeper sharks could have been in Antarctica for a long time without anyone noticing.
The shark that was photographed was swimming at a depth of about 500 meters (1,640 feet) along the ocean floor. According to Jamieson, the shark stayed at that level because it was the warmest layer of water.
The Antarctic Ocean is heavily layered, or stratified, to a depth of around 1,000 meters (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.
