SWIMMING SPEED
The Greenland shark is one of the slowest swimming sharks in the world and we have often observed Greenland sharks that were almost immobile. However, based on our hundreds of visual observations of free-swimming Greenland sharks, and having carefully analysed hours of video images as well as several months of acoustic telemetry data, we have determined that the average swimming speed of the Greenland shark in the St. Lawrence Estuary is 0.3 m/s. GEERG telemetry data from 2005 has also allowed us to calculate a long-distance average speed of 0.3 m/s for a single shark over a period of 29 hours and a distance of 26 km (Gallant et al. 2016). We have also observed the Greenland shark reaching or exceeding bursts of speeds of 1 m/s, which is a common occurrence during tagging operations by divers. Reports of a top speed of 0.7 m/s (1.6 mph) for this species are therefore false. Reports of the Greenland shark requiring "a full seven seconds just to move its tail back and forth" are also false as can be clearly observed in our video sequence at the top of this page.