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Melbourne, Australia — A lanky shark languidly sailing over an arid seafloor too deep for the sun’s rays to illuminate it was an unexpected sight.

Many experts had thought sharks did not exist in the frigid waters of Antarctica before this sleeping shark appeared cautiously and briefly in the spotlight of a video camera, researcher Alan Jamieson said this week. The shark, filmed in January 2025, was a substantial specimen with an estimated length of between 10 and 13 feet.

“We went there not expecting to see sharks because there’s a general rule that you don’t see sharks in Antarctica,” Jamieson said. “And it’s not even small. It’s a piece of 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 placed off the South Shetland Islands, near the Antarctic Peninsula. That’s well within the boundaries of the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, which is defined below the 60-degree south latitude line.

On Wednesday, the center gave The News permission to publish the images.

The shark was 1,608 feet deep, where the water temperature was a near freezing 34.29 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the painting a motionless stingray appears on the seabed, apparently unperturbed by the passage of the shark. The stingray, a stingray-like relative of the shark, was not a surprise since scientists already knew its range extended that far south.

Jamieson, 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 centre, agreed that a shark had never before been recorded this far south.

Climate change and ocean warming It could potentially be driving sharks to the colder waters of the Southern Hemisphere, but there was limited data on distribution changes near Antarctica due to the region’s remoteness, Kyne said.

The slow-moving sleeper sharks could have been in Antarctica for a long time without anyone noticing, he said.

“This is fantastic. The shark was in the right place, the camera was in the right place and they got these great images,” Kyne said. “It’s pretty significant.”

The sleeper shark population in the Southern Ocean was probably scarce and difficult for humans to detect, Jamieson said.

The photographed shark was holding at a depth of around 1,640 feet along a seafloor that sloped toward much deeper waters. The shark maintained that depth because it was the warmest layer of several layers of water stacked on top of each other at the surface, Jamieson said.

The Southern Ocean is highly stratified, or stratified, to a depth of about 3,280 feet due to conflicting properties that include colder, denser water from below that does not mix easily with fresh water flowing from melting ice from above.

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 are can only operate during the summer months of the southern hemisphere, from December to February.

“The other 75% of the year, no one looks at all. And I think that’s why we occasionally run into these surprises,” Jamieson said.