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Cairns, Australia The ocean taught me that there are two kinds of silence. The Australian Great Barrier Reef is not very deep. Just a few metres: the water seen from above looks like a big, bottle green stain surrounded by a dark, heavy blue. And in those few metres I discovered the silence of sea life. All it takes is a deep breath, dive your head under water and you find yourself in a whole new world. Big rocks covered in so many corals you lose count, so many colours that you wonder how it is possible to find them in the water: gold, purple, white, yellow, pink. They move gently following the pace of the waves, they look like flowers touched by a kind wind. Corals create hidden spots and ravines far away from predator eyes, and in there is where the small fish go and hide: clown fish, blue and black fish, yellow and grey fish and zebra fish. There are so many and they move so fast that you ask yourself if you're dreaming or if everything you see, these colourful flashes, are real. With your head under water you become a tourist in their world, their home and you become part of something where time doesn't exist and you forget about life above the surface, the world where you belong to. Because when your gaze lands on the slow corals breathing, on the clown fish, you sink in a dream dimension where the silence of the frenetic sea life reigns supreme and you can't have enough of it. There aren't noises, there aren't any audible sounds yet you can see life moving right under your eyes. But the silence of sea life is not the only one that lives under the ocean. I swim away from the Barrier Reef, just a few strokes and underneath me is the void. Underneath my body there is the dark and deep abyss. So dark it doesn't show me its end. Just in front of me - so close that if I stretch my arm I can touch it - the Reef, and underneath me the absolute void of the oceans. This is the second kind of silence of the ocean: the silence of the abyss. I look down, right into it, and I understand that I just made a big mistake. Looking down to the abyss is like looking straight into the sun, you feel it burning your eyes but you can't stop, you have to keep looking. And the abyss wants to be seen and I feel like it wants to grab me. I wonder how is it possible that I'm still swimming when there is absolute nothing underneath me, I wonder how is it possible that I'm still whole when in that thick blackness live those creature that repudiate the light. I ask myself why I'm still looking down. I feel nauseous, my back tickles with fear and even though I'm still floating I feel like I'm falling. The silence of the abyss has the power of calmness and terror, it is harassing and thunders in my head like an echo. The abyss hits me with its horrible truth: it is too vast for me to even begin to understand the power of the oceans. But if the ocean taught me that there are two kind of silence, I discovered right here, under the surface, that there is a third type: the silence of Mankind. And it devours everything. The colourful and vital Barrier Reef, the deep and mysterious abyss are dying. The corals are like old newspaper, the colours are fading, the fish are lesser and lesser. Like wrecked abandoned ships, those rocks are standing in the middle of this submarine world without being able to hide the desert they've become. And mankind brought this new silence. And when I was there, swimming and free, I could hear the desperate scream of the ocean. I could hear it begging for a help that most likely will never arrive.