Shark appeared for the first time in Antarctic waters

A sensational discovery in the icy depths of the Southern Ocean has forced scientists to reconsider a long-held belief: sharks do inhabit Antarctic waters after all. A giant sleeper shark up to four meters long was captured on video near the South Shetland Islands — these predators have never been recorded this far south before. This was reported by The Independent.

The unique footage was obtained by a camera from the Minderoo–UWA Deep Sea Research Centre at the University of Western Australia. The equipment was operating at a depth of approximately 490 meters, where the water temperature barely reached 1.27 °C.

"We absolutely did not expect to see sharks — after all, there's an unwritten rule: they simply don't exist in Antarctica. And this isn't some small fish — we're looking at a true giant," shared Alan Jamieson, the centre's director.

The scientist emphasized: until now, the scientific literature lacked confirmed data of shark encounters south of the 60th parallel — the official boundary of the Southern Ocean. Independent expert Peter Kyne, a conservation biologist from Charles Darwin University, confirmed: such southerly records indeed did not exist.

In the video, the shark glides leisurely over the lifeless seabed. A ray also appeared in the frame — a distant relative of sharks, resembling a stingray in appearance. Its presence did not puzzle the scientists: the habitation of rays in southern latitudes has long been documented.

Researchers put forward a hypothesis: sleeper sharks may have inhabited Antarctic waters before, but remained invisible due to the extreme inaccessibility of the region. The Southern Ocean has a special structure: cold dense waters at depth barely mix with fresher currents from melting ice. At approximately the 500-meter mark, a relatively "warm" layer forms — and that is precisely where the predator was discovered.

Jamieson suggests that these sharks feed on carcasses of whales, giant squid, and other large marine inhabitants that slowly sink to the bottom. However, observations are extremely scarce: cameras at such depths operate only during the Southern Hemisphere's summer months — from December to February.

Scientists allow that global warming and changing ocean temperatures may be influencing predator migration, however, insufficient data on range shifts in the Antarctic region has been collected so far.