An unexpected shark sighting in the near-freezing depths of Antarctica is prompting new attention to the animals’ possible range, after a research center released video evidence it says supports the first recorded shark in the Antarctic Ocean. The footage was captured in January 2025 off the South Shetland Islands near the Antarctic Peninsula, when a deep-sea camera operated by the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre recorded what appeared to be a sleeper shark moving over a barren seabed.
Minderoo-UWA staff and outside researchers said the sighting challenged a common assumption that sharks were unlikely to exist in Antarctica’s frigid waters. Alan Jamieson, the founding director of the University of Western Australia-based research center, said many experts had thought sharks did not exist there before the sleeper shark “lumbered warily and briefly into the spotlight” of the camera.
Jamieson said the team went to the site with an expectation of not seeing sharks. “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,” he said. He added that the animal in the video was not small, saying, “And it’s not even a little one either. It’s a hunk of a shark. These things are tanks.”
The camera recorded the shark at a depth of about 490 meters, where the water temperature was about 1.27 degrees Celsius (34.29 degrees Fahrenheit). The researchers estimated the shark’s length at between 3 and 4 meters (10 and 13 feet), describing it as a substantial specimen. In the frame, a skate—a shark relative with a stingray-like appearance—appeared motionless on the seabed and appeared unperturbed by the passing shark.
The center gave The Associated Press permission to publish the images. Jamieson said he could find no record of another shark being found in the Antarctic Ocean, and Peter Kyne, a Charles Darwin University conservation biologist who is independent of the research center, agreed that a shark had never before been recorded so far south. Kyne also said there was limited data on range changes near Antarctica because of how remote the region is.
Both researchers pointed to potential drivers for sightings in colder waters, including warming oceans and climate change. Kyne said those factors could potentially be driving sharks to the Southern Hemisphere’s colder waters, while also noting that long-term evidence of range shifts near Antarctica remains sparse. Jamieson said the slow-moving sleeper sharks could have been in Antarctica for a long time without people noticing, given how hard the region can be to study.
Jamieson described the ocean conditions at the depth where the shark was filmed as part of the explanation for why it maintained its position. He said the shark was maintaining a depth of around 500 meters along a seabed sloping into deeper water, and that the shark held there because that layer was the warmest of multiple stacked water layers reaching up toward the surface. He said the Antarctic Ocean is heavily stratified to around 1,000 meters (3,280 feet), shaped by colder, denser water below that mixes less readily with fresher water flowing in from melting ice above.
The researchers said the depth where the shark was recorded likely connects to what the animals eat. Jamieson said he expected other Antarctic sharks to live at the same depth and feed on carcasses of whales, giant squids and other marine creatures that die and sink to the bottom. He added that few research cameras are positioned at that specific depth in Antarctic waters, and those cameras can only operate during the Southern Hemisphere summer months—December through February—meaning much of the year goes unobserved.
“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. He called it “quite significant,” while Jamieson said the sleeper shark population in the Antarctic Ocean was likely sparse and difficult for humans to detect.