Melbourne, Australia – The ungainly barrel of a shark languidly sailing across a barren seabed too deep for the sun’s rays to illuminate it was an unexpected sight.
Many experts thought sharks did not exist in the frigid waters of Antarctica before this sleeping shark cautiously and briefly approached the focus of a video camera, researcher Alan Jamieson said this week. The shark, filmed in January 2025, was a burly specimen with an estimated length of between 3 and 4 meters.
“We weren’t expecting to see sharks, because the general rule is that there are no sharks in Antarctica,” explains Jamieson.
“And it’s not even small. It’s a huge shark. These things are tanks,” he added.
The camera, operated by the Minderoo-UWA Deep Sea Research Centre, which investigates life in the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, was located off the South Shetland Islands, near the Antarctic Peninsula. This area is located within the limits of the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, which is located below the line of 60 degrees south latitude.
The center on Wednesday authorized The Associated Press to publish the images.
The shark was 490 meters deep and the water temperature was 34.29 degrees Fahrenheit (1.27 degrees Celsius).
In the frame a motionless stingray appears on the seabed and apparently unperturbed by the passage of the shark. The stingray, a stingray-like relative of the shark, was no surprise, as scientists already knew its range extended this far south.
Jamieson, who is the founding director of the research center based at the University of Western Australia, said he could not find any record of another shark found in the Southern Ocean.
Peter Kyne, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University independent of the research center, agreed that a shark had never before been recorded this far south.
Climate change and warming oceans could be pushing sharks toward the colder waters of the Southern Hemisphere, but data on range changes near Antarctica is limited due to the remoteness of the region, according to Kyne.
Slow-moving sleeper sharks could have been in Antarctica for a long time without anyone noticing.
“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. “It’s pretty significant.”
The population of sleeper sharks in the Southern Ocean was probably scarce and difficult for humans to detect, Jamieson said.
The photographed shark maintained a depth of about 500 meters along a seabed that sloped toward much deeper waters. The shark maintained that depth because that was the warmest layer of several layers of water stacked on top of each other to the surface, Jamieson said.
The Southern Ocean is strongly stratified to a depth of about 1,000 meters due to conflicting properties, such as the colder, denser water at the bottom not mixing easily with fresh water flowing from melting ice at the top.
Jamieson expects other Antarctic sharks to live at the same depth, feeding on the carcasses of whales, giant squid and other sea creatures that die and sink to the bottom.
There are few research chambers located at that specific depth in Antarctic waters. Those that exist can only operate during the summer months of the southern hemisphere, from December to February.
This story was translated from English to Spanish with an artificial intelligence tool and was reviewed by an editor before publication.