Antarctica has long been considered a place too cold and too hostile for sharks. Well, maybe we just weren’t looking hard enough because a shark, for the first time, has been filmed swimming in Antarctic waters.
The New York Times reports that in January 2025, researchers with the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre captured footage of a huge sleeper shark gliding through the South Shetland Trough, more than 1600 feet below the surface. The water temperature was around two degrees Celsius, or 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists watch the live feed, stunned. There are no sharks in the Antarctic, or so goes the previously commonly accepted knowledge.
Estimated to be 10 to 13 feet long, the shark appears to be a southern sleeper shark, a slow-moving deepwater predator usually found across the southern ocean but had never been documented this far south. Researchers involved say this is the most southerly shark sighting ever.
Scientists Just Filmed a Shark in Antarctic Waters for the First Time
The shark was filmed cruising within a slightly warmer, mid-depth water layer. The Southern Ocean is vertically stratified, meaning temperature and salinity shift with depth. Researchers believe this relatively “warmer” section may allow sleeper sharks to move farther south than previously assumed.
Arctic waters can be extreme in every sense. Luckily, sleeper sharks are built for extremes. Their Arctic relatives, like the Greenland sleeper shark, can live more than 250 years and are filled with bodily fluids that resist freezing. This lets them survive in conditions that would have otherwise frozen them into an ice cube. This physiological edge might explain how this species navigates Antarctic waters.
The question researchers now face is whether this shark has always been there or whether factors, such as climate change, are making these waters more habitable for it. Some of the researchers caution against immediately blaming climate change, since Antarctica is one of the least-studied marine environments on Earth, and the sharks may have been there the whole time and we never noticed. Though climate change can’t be completely ruled out, as warming oceans have shifted species distributions worldwide, and every terrain, from land animals to sea creatures, to avians.
Now that researchers know this shark is there at all, they know what to look for and have a slightly better idea as to where to place their cameras.
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