Shark caught on camera for 1st time in waters of Antarctica

The mysterious depths of the Antarctic Ocean are home to only a handful of sea creatures.

Footage of a sleeper shark traversing a barren Antarctic seabed has left experts with much to discuss, as the newly captured video contradicts a widely held belief that the deep-sea dwellers don’t live in the region.

Many experts thought sharks didn’t exist in the frigid waters of Antarctica, the researcher and founding director of the Deep-Sea Research Centre at the University of Western Australia, Alan Jamieson, said this week.

The shark, filmed in January 2025, was substantially sized, estimated to be between three and four metres long.

“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 told The Associated Press. “And it’s not even a little one either. It’s a hunk of a shark. These things are tanks.”

The camera operated by the Australian research facility, which studies life in the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, was positioned off the South Shetland Islands near the Antarctic Peninsula.

The shark was spotted swimming at a depth of 490 metres, in temperatures hovering just above 1 C.

The shark was swimming at that depth because it was in the warmest of several water layers stacked on top of each other, Jamieson explained, adding that he found no other record of any shark swimming in the Antarctic Ocean.

Another expert, Peter Kyne, a Charles Darwin University conservation biologist not associated with the research centre, agreed that there were no previous records of a shark swimming so far south.