Shark caught on camera for the first time in near-freezing depths of Antarctica
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An ugly barrel shark hovering lazily on the barren ocean floor too dark for sunlight was an unexpected sight.
Researcher Alan Jamieson said this week that many experts thought sharks did not exist in the cold waters of Antarctica, before this sleeper shark crawled carefully and briefly under the light of a video camera. The shark filmed in January 2025 was a large specimen, estimated to be between 3 and 4 meters (10 and 13 ft) in length.
“We went there not expecting to see sharks because there’s a general rule of thumb that you don’t find sharks in Antarctica,” Jamieson said.
He said, “And it’s not a small one either. It’s a piece of shark. These things are tanks.”
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 on the South Shetland Islands near the Antarctic Peninsula. It is within the boundaries of the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, which is defined below the 60 degrees south latitude line.
The center on Wednesday gave permission to The Associated Press to publish the photos.
The shark was at a depth of 490 meters where the water temperature was about 1.27 degrees Celsius.
A skate in the frame appears motionless on the ocean floor and appears to be unaffected by the passing shark. The skate, a shark relative that looks like a stingray, was no surprise because scientists already knew their range extended south.
Martin Froger Silva, videographer at the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, tells The National about the moment he filmed the inside of a millions-year-old glacier in Antarctica.
Jameson, who is the founding director of the research center based at the University of Western Australia, said he could find no record of any other sharks being found in the Antarctic Ocean.
Conservation biologist Peter Kyne of Charles Darwin University, independent of the research centre, agreed that the shark had never before been recorded this far south.
Kaine said climate change and warming oceans are likely driving sharks toward the cooler waters of the Southern Hemisphere, but data on range changes near Antarctica was limited due to the region’s remoteness.
The slow-moving sleeper sharks may have been in Antarctica for a long time and no one would have even noticed, he said.
“It’s great. The shark was in the right place, the camera was in the right place and they got this great footage,” Kaine said. “It is quite important.”
Jamison said sleeper shark populations in the Antarctic Ocean were likely sparse and difficult for humans to detect.
The shark photographed was submerged in very deep water, about 500 meters (1,640 ft) below the sea floor. Jamison said the shark maintained that depth because it was the warmest of several layers of water layered on top of each other at the surface.
The Antarctic Ocean is heavily layered or stratified to a depth of about 1,000 m (3,280 ft) because of conflicting properties, including cold, dense water from below that does not mix easily with fresh water flowing from melting ice above.
Jamieson hopes that other Antarctic sharks also live at the same depths, feeding on the carcasses of whales, giant squid and other sea creatures that die and sink to the bottom.
There are few research cameras deployed at that specific depth in Antarctic waters. Which can only operate during the Southern Hemisphere summer months from December to February.
“Nobody’s paying attention the other 75 percent of the year. And that’s why, I think, we get these surprises sometimes,” Jamison said.
