Shark Turns Up in a Most Unexpected Place

An ungainly barrel of a shark cruising languidly over a barren seabed far too deep for the sun's rays to illuminate was an unexpected sight. Many experts had thought sharks didn't exist in the frigid waters of Antarctica before this sleeper shark lumbered warily and briefly into the spotlight of a video camera, researcher Alan Jamieson said this week, per the AP. The shark, filmed in January 2025, was a substantial specimen with an estimated length of between 10 and 13 feet. "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," Jamieson said. "And it's not even a little one either. It's a hunk of a shark."

The camera operated by the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, which investigates life in the deepest parts of the world's oceans, was positioned off the South Shetland Islands near the Antarctic Peninsula. That is well inside the boundaries of the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, which is defined as below the 60-degree south latitude line. The sleeper shark was 1,608 feet deep where the water temperature was a near-freezing 34.29 degrees Fahrenheit. The shark maintained that depth because that was the warmest layer of several water layers stacked upon each other to the surface, said Jamieson, founding director of the University of Western Australia-based research center.

Jamieson 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 alternatively, they may have long been in Antarctica without anyone noticing, Kyne said. 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, though he says the population is likely sparse and difficult for humans to detect.