Summary: <p>This week is our six-month anniversary! To celebrate, we’ll learn about some of the creatures that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench’s deepest section, Challenger Deep, as well as other animals who live in deep caves on land. We also learn what I will and will not do for a million dollars (hint: I will not implode in a bathysphere).</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-264" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/xenophyophore-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169"></p> <p>A xenophyophore IN THE GRIP OF A ROBOT</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-266" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/callout-deepest-fish3-300x203.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="203"></p> <p>A snailfish from five miles down in the Mariana trench.</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-265" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/hades-centipede-1160-300x144.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="144"></p> <p>The Hades centipede. It’s not as big as it looks, honest.</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-268" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/olm-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200"></p> <p>The tiny but marvelous olm.</p> <p>Show transcript:</p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>For this week’s episode, we’re going to find out what lives in the deepest, darkest places of the earth—places humans have barely glimpsed. We’re not just talking deep sea, we’re talking the abyssal depths.</p> <p>Like onions and parfaits, the earth is made up of many layers. The core of the earth is a ball of nickel and iron surrounded by more nickel and iron. The outer core is molten metal, but the inner core, even though it’s even hotter than the outer core—as hot as the surface of the sun—has gone through the other side of liquid and is solid again. Surrounding the core, the earth’s mantle is a thick layer of rocks and minerals some 1900 miles deep, and on top of that is the crust of the earth, which doesn’t actually sound very appealing but that’s where we live and we know it’s really pretty, with trees and oceans and stuff on top of it. The upper part of the mantle is broken up into tectonic plates, which move around very slowly as the molten metals and rocks beneath them swirl around and get pushed up through cracks in the mantle.</p> <p>Under the oceans, the crust of the earth is only around 3 miles thick. And in a few places, there are crevices that actually break entirely through the crust into the mantle below. The deepest crack in the sea floor is the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. At its deepest part, a narrow valley called Challenger Deep, the crack extends sev</p>
