Chilling moment underwater drone dropped to bottom of the Great Blue Hole captures footage that will 'terrify the world'

The Great Blue Hole, around 60 miles off the coast of Belize, looks like a perfect sapphire circle carved into the Caribbean.

From below, however, it tells a different story.

Over the years, explorers have dropped drones into the gargantuan marine sinkhole, which began as a dry limestone cave system during the last Ice Age.

But as sea levels rose, the cave essentially flooded and collapsed, forming the circular oceanic void measuring around 318 metres across, with estimated depths of roughly 124 metres.

Its reputation as one of the most feared dive sites on Earth was born after human remains from two people were found there, along with GoPros and plastic waste.

Following the previous exhibition findings, YouTuber Will Mitchell attempted to lower an underwater drone straight down to the bottom of the hole with a GoPo and lots of weights.

The Great Blue Hole is located off the coast of Belize in Central America, near the centre of Lighthouse Reef (Getty Stock Images)

At first, the footage was quite remarkable, showing bright blue water and marine life, as well as the occasional shark circling the device.

Before getting all the way down, however, a shark suddenly vanishes from view before reappearing without warning.

It ends up smashing directly into the drone and sends the footage spinning chaotically.

“The shark just blitzed us,” he said in his video posted last year.

The shark was not so friendly after all (YouTube/Will Mitchell)

Things then get more eerie at around 90 metres down when the camera passes through a thick layer of hydrogen sulphide — a toxic boundary beyond which life simply disappears.

In 2022, a group of scientists led by the Goethe University Frankfurt were in search of more answers in regard to its formation.

They travelled to the area and discovered that around 574 storm events had taken place over the last 5,700 years.

It's a dark void of death down there (YouTube/Beyond Discovery)

Dr Dominik Schmitt, lead author of the study and researcher in the Biosedimentology Research Group at Goethe University Frankfurt, explained: "Due to the unique environmental conditions – including oxygen-free bottom water and several stratified water layers – fine marine sediments could settle largely undisturbed in the Great Blue Hole.

"Inside the sediment core, they look a bit like tree rings."

Authors also noted that they anticipate even more storms in the next 100 years due to human-made global warming.

Professor Eberhard Gischler, head of the Biosedimentology Research Group at Goethe University Frankfurt, added: "Our results suggest that some 45 tropical storms and hurricanes could pass over this region in our century alone.

"This would far exceed the natural variability of the past millennia."