The mission MOBYDICK ended this Tuesday, March 20 at 4:15 local time (00:15 French time) and the RV Marion Dufresne has undertaken her return to the island of La Réunion that she will reach after 6 days of navigation. If the success of an oceanographic mission was measured by the number of operations carried out, there is no doubt that MOBYDICK will have been a success. These are 62 rosette deployments and associated sensors (CTD, LISST, LOPC, UVP, Eco-Triplet, Transmissiometer, Fluorometer), 9 deployments of in situ pumps and the ISMI (In Situ Microbial Incubator), 17 deployment of the multinet, numerous observations of birds and marine mammals, 115 vertical tows of plankton nets and 52 tows of pelagic trawl, which were carried out between 22 February and 19 March. In addition, there was the deployment of an autonomous bio-optical profiler and the recovery of an instrumented mooring. But the adventure is not over because it is now long hours of analyses that await project scientists on their return to the laboratories on the ground. Depending on their research theme, it will take several months to a few years to analyze the mass of samples that have been collected. It will also remain the memory of these 5 weeks spent at sea, often in difficult, physically hard, working conditions in one of the most austere, but how endearing, region of the World Ocean …
