Unusual Discovery of Sharks in Antarctic Waters

It was quite surprising to see a shark’s awkward form moving along the ocean floor, far below the reach of sunlight.

Alan Jamieson, a researcher, shared this week that many specialists believed there were no sharks in the icy waters of Antarctica—until a sleeper shark made an unexpected appearance in a video. The shark, spotted in January 2025, measured around 10 to 13 feet in length.

“We went there not really anticipating seeing sharks because the common assumption is that they don’t exist in Antarctica,” Jamieson remarked.

“And it’s not just a small shark, but a whole group of them. These creatures are massive,” he noted.

The camera capturing this moment was set up by the Mindelow UWA Deep Sea Research Center, which focuses on life in the deepest parts of our oceans. It was located off the coast of the South Shetland Islands, close to the Antarctic Peninsula.

This site is well within the boundaries of the Southern Ocean, marked as beneath the 60th parallel south latitude.

The Deep Sea Research Center allowed The Associated Press to release these images on Wednesday.

The footage was taken at a depth of 408 feet, where the water temperature was a chilling 34.29 degrees below zero.

Nearby skates were resting on the seabed, seemingly unaffected by the shark’s presence. Scientists already knew that skate rays could be found much further south.

Jamieson, who founded the research center at the University of Western Australia, noted that he hadn’t found any previous records of sharks existing in the Southern Ocean.

Peter Cain, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University who isn’t associated with the center, similarly stated that no sharks had ever been recorded this far down south.

There’s a possibility that climate change and warmer ocean conditions might lead sharks to explore colder waters in the southern hemisphere, but there isn’t much data available due to the inaccessibility of Antarctica, Cain explained.

Slow-moving sleeper sharks may have been residing in these waters unnoticed for quite some time, he suggested.

“This is incredible. The shark was in the right place, the camera was in the right place, and we captured some amazing footage,” Cain said, adding that this discovery was very significant.

Jamieson mentioned that sleeper shark populations in the Southern Ocean are probably quite scarce and hard for humans to detect.

The featured shark hung out at about 1,640 feet deep on the ocean floor, which slopes down into even deeper waters.

Jamieson explained that the shark could maintain that depth because it was in the warmest layer of water among those stacked up towards the surface.

The Southern Ocean has a stratified structure down to about 3,280 feet, influenced by the colder, denser water from below that doesn’t easily mix with the fresh water from melting ice above.

He suspects that other sharks similar to the sleeper variety might inhabit these depths, likely feeding on the carcasses of fallen whales, giant squid, and other marine creatures on the ocean floor.

Notably, there are very few survey cameras placed at specific depths in the Southern Ocean, and those that exist can only operate during the southern hemisphere summer months, from December to February.

“For the other 75 percent of the year, no one observes anything. That’s probably why we occasionally find surprises like this,” Jamieson reflected.