Boating McBoatface, Britain's most famous robot submarine, has returned to shore after two months exploring the deep ocean. Scientists hope the data gathered by the craft will help us learn more about the pace of climate change. Our climate and science reporter, Georgina Renard, has more.

With Only Birds for Company, Boating with Boatface is on the longest journey of its life, from Chile, Iceland, to the shores of Scotland. But as it dives thousands of meters, someone is keeping an eye on this little robot.

We can be at home having a cup of tea on the internet, and we can send it a message via satellite while it's out 300 miles to sea and tell it what to do.

From Mission Control at the National Oceanography Center in Southampton, Rob Templeton and team track Boaties every move. The robots are their pride and joy. They look after a fleet of six, all with the same name, voted for by the public. They're built to go where humans can't.

The advantage of Boaties is really the endurance and the ability to carry lots of sensors and stay out at sea for 50 days at a time. It can go and extend the reach of the scientists. We've sent ALR1 underneath the ice sheet for 40 kilometers where you couldn't go with the ship.

And it's here inside the machine's bellies where the team install instruments, turning Boatie into a mobile underwater lab.

Those robots are part of a huge British science project to understand this, phytoplankton. This sample came from the water down there, and it's teeming with microscopic life. Scientists need to understand marine life better to predict climate change. The robots can do some of the work, but to find out the rest, scientists need to go to sea themselves.

Steph Hensen invites us aboard the James Cook as it prepared to sail to Iceland. Scientists will live and work on here for weeks for a project called Biocarbon.

This is a working vessel There's no swimming pool. There's no bar and entertainment and all that thing.

This expedition wants to uncover what happens when animals eat phytoplankton, creating something called marine snow.

This is actually sediment taken from close to the bottom of the ocean in a sediment trap. This contains a lot of carbon. And believe it or not, it's this falling onto the sea floor as marine snow that keeps our atmospheric carbon dioxide levels about 50 % lower than they would otherwise be. It's made up of tiny little particles of organic carbon and quite a lot of our poop, actually.

Deep in the ocean, that marine snow is keeping our planet cooler, but life here is still mysterious. Understanding it should help scientists make more accurate predictions about our warming world. And now they've got a Head Start. Approaching Scotland after 55 days at sea, Boatie comes home with plenty of secrets reveal about the ocean depths. Georgina Rannard, BBC News, Southampton.

Georgina told me more about what's next for the mission.

Turns out he was out there, it was out there doing all this amazing science. He was turned into a mobile science lab diving down to 6000 meters of depth and constantly collecting the scientific data. The boat is back now. The engineer told me this morning it's a bit slimy. They're having to wash out parts of the ocean from the body of the submarine. But what they're doing is downloading all of that scientific data that Booty was collecting for those two months at sea. Because what scientists really want to understand the scientists at Southampton at the National Oceanography Center, is just how the oceans are storing carbon, how this marine snow, these particles that sink down to the depths of the ocean, what they're doing in capturing carbon and keeping our planet cooler. The first part of the mission is over. Some scientists went to sea in Iceland alongside Boathe, but they will actually be going again in autumn, and they want to compare the results they collected in the spring in this very productive part of the ocean in Iceland to what's happening in winter. And they're doing that in order to capture the marine life, this carbon cycle.

And once they've got the information, which will take months to gather and analyze, they will feed that back into climate models. And that should help us better predict the pace of climate change. And also they say, make better decisions about how our planet is going to warm and how we might be able to protect the oceans, stop warming temperatures affecting the oceans so that we can figure out the best way to move forward with this growing problem.