For three weeks, the French research and supply vessel Marion Dufresne II carried more than its usual logistics and oceanographic payload. Alongside the MAYOBS 36 scientific team sailed eighteen young people from across the region, twelve of them from La Réunion and Mayotte, the rest from Madagascar, the Seychelles and Mauritius. The programme that put them aboard, the École Bleu Outremer, is run by the French research institute for the exploitation of the sea (Ifremer) together with the direction générale des Outre-mer (DGOM), and its second edition treated the ship itself as an operating asset in education: a place where training capacity and research capacity run on the same voyage.
The economics of the arrangement are implicit rather than stated, but the structure is clear. The vessel, which already services the French Southern and Antarctic Lands with supply rotations, absorbed an additional payload of students and ten supervisors at no apparent cost to its core mission of monitoring the Fani Maoré underwater volcano off Mayotte. The students, in turn, supplied labour the campaign could use: mapping the seabed, operating cameras, sampling rock and water, studying biodiversity and searching for environmental DNA, and helping maintain the network of seabed seismometers that track seismic activity. Ifremer describes their contribution as helping to chart the seafloor, detect and characterise fluid and particle emissions, analyse the water column and collect volcanic rocks.
For the operators, that is a two-way return. The campaign gains extra hands under supervision; the students gain sea time and exposure no classroom can replicate. Clément Françoise, a 19-year-old student at the École d’apprentissage maritime de La Réunion (EAMR), had logged six missions at sea before this one, yet called it the first time he had felt something so strong. “At the moment of leaving the boat, we all cried. It was one of the best experiences of my life,” he told Outremers360, adding that he would say yes immediately to sailing again.
The programme’s design reflects a deliberate bet on cross-disciplinary mixing. It brought together university students, EAMR apprentices and art students, spanning levels from vocational certificates to doctorates and postdocs. Pascale Chabanet, research director at the IRD (Institut de recherche pour le développement) and godmother of this second edition, acknowledged the challenge: “It was a big challenge to have students with different levels of training: licence, master, bac pro, doctorat, postdoc. Our wish was to cross perspectives between disciplines and between the environmental issues we know in the region.” She added that art proved a useful tool for drawing out different languages, viewpoints and disciplines. The concept has been described as “floating universities”, with the ship as the learning site.
The scientific payoff was most direct for those whose research aligned with the mission. Émilie Rigouard, a second-year doctoral student at the Université de La Réunion studying gas release from underwater mountains, said seeing the volcano through onboard cameras moved her deeply: she finally saw the object she has worked on for a year, alongside researchers she had corresponded with for months. Emma Bravo, also a second-year doctoral student at the same university, researches groundwater resources on Rodrigues in the Mascareignes archipelago; she assisted with water sampling on her first voyage aboard an oceanographic vessel, describing round-the-clock manipulations as very enriching.
Meanwhile, four art students from the École supérieure d’art de La Réunion and the Université de Mayotte, supervised by scientific illustrator Diana Chauchon, produced drawn and recorded interviews, collective logbooks, science-popularisation posters and poetic writing workshops. One of them, Émilie Grondin, worked with photography and the polaroid lift technique to echo the fragility of the marine environment, aiming to make visible the volcanoes and underwater mountains. “An artist is like a scientist: he prepares, he analyses samples, he collects fragments. That is what I did,” she said.
Knowledge flowed in every direction, according to participants. Philippe Berthier, a professor at EAMR, taught a knots course that proved popular with researchers and students alike; Chabanet noted that everyone was both teacher and learner at once. Berthier observed that his maritime students took an interest in artistic and scientific work while the researchers tried their hand at seamanship. Françoise took part in dredging missions and came away with a changed outlook: “Navigating on the water and understanding the ocean are two different things. You can spend days at sea without understanding what is underneath.”
All five students interviewed agreed the experience changed them. “The 18 young people who boarded and the 18 who disembarked are not the same people,” Rigouard said. A third edition will likely take place in the coming years, Chabanet indicated, though for now, presentations of the onboard experience, including the artistic work, will be held in La Réunion and Mayotte. Whether that next voyage again pairs a funded research campaign with a floating classroom may depend on how the operators weigh the return on both.