A rare deep-sea discovery has challenged long-held assumptions about marine life in the coldest ocean on Earth.
Scientists have captured the first-ever video evidence of a shark swimming in Antarctic waters, revealing that these elusive predators may inhabit environments once considered too frigid for them to survive.
The unexpected encounter, reported by news agency AP, occurred in January 2025, when a remotely operated camera from the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre recorded a sleeper shark gliding slowly over a dark, barren seabed near the South Shetland Islands, off the Antarctic Peninsula.
The shark, estimated to be 3 to 4 meters long, appeared at a depth of about 490 meters, where water temperatures hovered just above freezing at 1.27°C.
“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 Alan Jamieson, founding director of the research centre. “And it’s not even a little one either. It’s a hunk of a shark. These things are tanks.”
The footage shows the slow-moving predator passing calmly across the seafloor while a skate, a ray-like relative of sharks, remains motionless nearby, seemingly undisturbed. While skates are known to inhabit Antarctic waters, the presence of a shark so far south had never been documented before.
Marine biologist Peter Kyne of Charles Darwin University, who was not involved in the research, described the sighting as “quite significant,” noting that the remoteness of the Antarctic Ocean has limited scientific observation. He suggested sleeper sharks may have lived in the region for years without detection.
Scientists say the layered structure of Antarctic waters may help explain the sighting. The shark appeared to remain near 500 meters depth, likely the warmest available water layer, where animals can survive by feeding on sunken carcasses of whales, squid, and other marine life.
Because deep-sea cameras in Antarctica operate only during the Southern Hemisphere summer, vast stretches of the ocean remain unobserved for most of the year. That makes discoveries like this rare, and a reminder of how little is known about life in Earth’s deepest, coldest waters.
