Hey listeners, today we're sharing something a little different, a story that starts with an alligator, a deep sea robot and a mystery at the bottom of the ocean.

It's from the podcast Oceans, Life Underwater, hosted by wildlife filmmaker Hannah Stipfool and made by Greenpeace and Crowd Network.

The series explores the hidden wonders of our oceans,

but also the creatures, questions and survival strategies that exist far beneath the surface, in the parts of our world we rarely see. In this episode, scientists drop an alligator 2,000 metres into the deep.

What do they find when they return?

That's where things get strange.

This is the deep ocean like you've never heard it before.

Eerie, otherworldly, and full of surprises.

Here comes the episode.

You can listen to more of Oceans' Life Underwater Season 2

on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

So we started on the research ship.

We're way offshore.

The ocean is thousands of meters beneath the deck.

And we put our robot in the ocean, this massive car-sized machine that's going to be our eyes

and ears and hands in the deep. But we've also clasped in its hands a dead alligator, which

had never been done before.

So we watched this alligator disappear down beneath the waves, this robot sinking down with it.

And we waited until the cameras came on, and we ran back into the control room and could look at the screens, which is the video coming up from this robot as it's sinking down into the deep.

And we can see that the water at first is green and there's light, but quite quickly it's getting

darker. We can see the sunlight is running out all around it as it's sinking down and down.

It took an hour for it to reach our destination, which was a 2,000 metres down on the seabed, on the abyss.

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