I get it. It's hard to care or even enjoy something you cannot see.
So, how about I show it to you?
This isn't the Caribbean, and this is not a coral reef.
This underwater garden only grows in the Mediterranean Sea.
Here, at 120 metres below the surface, nothing is really what it seems.
When you're down so deep, small creatures are free to become giants.
Black coral isn't black.
Flowers are, in fact, worms.
And mythical creatures come to life
to show you that there is still a lot you don't know.
For 30 years I've dived in a lot of places in the world
and mostly in the Mediterranean Sea.
I've seen things that not even my wildest imagination
could begin to picture.
And in all of those years,
I've learnt this one thing: deep, deep down,
away from the harmful touch of humans, a whole new planet exists.
I call it the Mediterranean Planet.
If I remember my youth, my words weren't enough to describe it.
I saw in the eyes of my parents and friends that,
"Really? Really? That's really what you see underwater?"
and I realised, at least at this time during my youth,
that it was really important to show what I was finding underwater,
to push people to understand that the ocean is really another world.
The biggest challenge for deep diving, of course, is the decompression.
For example, at 120 metres, if you spend half-an-hour,
it's going to be at least five hours of decompression, of ascent.
If the problem of deep diving is the ascent,
the solution is no ascent anymore.
Or at least to make believe to your body that there is no ascent
and that's what we did with the Deep Station.
So, in the summer of 2019, together with other three aquanauts,
I went into a voluntary lockdown to rediscover the Mediterranean Sea.
And we spent 28 days,
at more or less 100 metres, using this Deep Station between our dives.
The Deep Station offers us a very important perspective to explore
a very particular ecosystem, which is the coralligenous reef,
that only lives at very great depths.
There, with the Deep Station, you no longer need six hours of decompression,
which is very ineffective when studying at deep depths.
Instead, you can spend six hours a day at the bottom
to study these very important ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea.
It wasn't easy. We lived in a constant struggle against the extremes.
The unbearable heat inside the diving bell
against the freezing temperatures of the deep sea.
From the inaction inside to the frenzy outside.
From claustrophobia to vertigo.
I chose the Mediterranean Sea for several reasons.
First, because that's my sea, the place I know the best.
And also, because I was fed up
about what is commonly said about the Mediterranean Sea.
Like it would be like a trashcan,
the most polluted sea.
Of course, the Mediterranean Sea is polluted, of course it's overfished,
of course, there is too much plastic in the water, of course, of course...
But that doesn't mean the Mediterranean Sea is dead.
For the creatures of the deep, the existence of the sun is, at best,
a possibility, and the fury of storms barely a rumour.
They remain oblivious to our world and invisible to our imagination.
Like this copper-coloured cod.
It's not like they're rare, they are just unreachable.
The same as this parrot seaperch.
Or these squids, who we captured just as they were mating.
Here, away from indiscreet eyes, life becomes playful, joyful and colourful again.
These ecosystems are important because they are at the edge of the light,
therefore, at the limit of life which is present underwater
and this is also the difficulty of studying them.
There are very deep ecosystems where diversity is present,
but very discreet, very rare.
Any modification or global changes,
as seen with the increase of temperatures in general,
will have an impact on these populations.
I do my job.
I show that there's still life to discover,
there are still ecosystems to enjoy.
It doesn't matter if there is no hope.
What are the most beautiful fights?
The fights that look lost in advance.
It took a team of 30 people, four aquanauts, a Deep Station and 28 days
but we saw it. We saw that not everything is lost.
I don't have answers. All I know is what I see.
And with my photographs, at least you can no longer say that you didn't see.
Now, you know as well.