The Greenland shark can live for 400 years, outlasting the ships that once hunted it

In the cold, dark waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic swims a shark that may be the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth. The Greenland shark grows slowly, moves sluggishly and can survive for centuries, meaning individuals alive today could have been born before the founding of modern nations. Its extreme longevity has made it one of the most intriguing animals in the ocean and a subject of intense scientific curiosity.

A creature of the cold and dark

Greenland sharks live in frigid, deep waters, often far below the surface where temperatures hover near freezing. That environment shapes everything about them. Cold slows the pace of life, and these sharks move so slowly that their unhurried cruising has become part of their reputation. Their metabolism runs at a crawl, and they appear to do everything, growing, moving, aging, in slow motion.

They are also large, ranking among the biggest sharks in the world, and they are generalist feeders that scavenge and hunt a wide range of prey in the deep. Living where few researchers can easily observe them, much of their behavior remains poorly documented, adding to the mystery that surrounds the species.

Centuries in a single lifetime

The most astonishing fact about the Greenland shark is its lifespan. Scientific estimates suggest individuals may live for around four centuries, a span that would make the species the longest-lived vertebrate known. Determining that figure was itself a scientific feat, because Greenland sharks lack the hard, layered structures that researchers normally use to age fish.

Instead, scientists turned to the tissue of the sharks’ eyes, which forms early in life and preserves a chemical record that can be analyzed to estimate age. The results pointed to lifespans measured in hundreds of years, implying that the oldest individuals swimming today were alive during eras that now feel like distant history.

Growing up over decades

Such longevity comes with a slow tempo of life at every stage. Greenland sharks grow only a tiny amount each year and are thought not to reach maturity until they are well over a century old. An animal that takes that long simply to begin reproducing lives on a timescale utterly unlike the fast-breeding fish more familiar to people.

That pace has profound consequences for the species’ survival. A population that grows and reproduces so slowly cannot quickly recover from losses, so any pressure that removes adults, whether hunting, bycatch or environmental change, can take an outsized and long-lasting toll. Longevity, in that sense, is both the shark’s marvel and its vulnerability.

Hunted for oil, then left behind

For generations, Greenland sharks were caught for the oil in their livers, which was rendered and used for lamps, lubrication and other purposes before petroleum and modern alternatives took over. That fishery once drew ships into the northern seas in pursuit of the slow, deep-dwelling sharks.

The industry eventually faded as the demand for shark-liver oil collapsed, and the vessels moved on. Individual sharks that survived that era could, given their centuries-long lifespans, still be alive, having outlasted the very fishery that once targeted them, a quiet reversal of fortunes playing out in the cold depths.

A slow life in a fast-changing ocean

Today the Greenland shark faces newer pressures. It can be caught accidentally in fishing gear set for other species, and the Arctic waters it depends on are warming and changing as the climate shifts. For an animal that measures its life in centuries, adapting to rapid environmental change is a formidable challenge.

Scientists continue to study the species not only for its record-breaking longevity but for what it might reveal about aging itself. An animal that resists the decline most vertebrates suffer over mere decades is a natural puzzle, and unlocking how it endures for so long could hold lessons that reach well beyond the cold, dark seas it calls home.

A living link to earlier centuries

An animal that can live for hundreds of years is more than a biological curiosity; it is a kind of living archive. A single Greenland shark’s lifespan may stretch across enormous changes in the human world and in the ocean itself, meaning one individual could carry, in its tissues, a chemical record spanning eras that people now study only through history books.

That longevity also reframes how such an animal should be valued and protected. Losing a single old shark is not like losing a short-lived fish that a population can quickly replace; it is the loss of a creature that took a century or more to mature and cannot be swiftly replaced. Conservation of a species like this must operate on a timescale to match its lifespan.

Researchers are only beginning to grasp what these sharks can teach. Questions about how they avoid the diseases and decline that shorten most lives, and how their slow biology copes with a fast-warming Arctic, remain largely open. For an animal that has quietly outlasted the fishery that once pursued it, the most interesting chapters of its scientific story may still lie ahead.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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