The spiral symbolises life forces in the natural world:
From 4.1 Collecting evidence of what the scientists, and others who have worked in Antarctica, have observed and responded to in the landscape:
In 2004 I worked briefly in Tasmania at the Australian Antarctic Division. The icebreaker Aurora Australis had just returned from a voyage around Heard Island. The ship had a camera attached to its hull to film the ocean floor. This was an experiment, something new. Given access to that film, I drew.
Lights had been placed above the camera to illuminate the scene, and laser points beamed out for spatial registration. You could work out the size of things, the scale of this new world. You could see it for the first time, measure it, and respond to it.
Pencil in hand, I watched the glowing screen reveal its vision. Plants and animals yet to be named by scientists danced before me. Some forms had been nicknamed Piglets, strange little floating things. Carcasses perhaps, they floated like empty shells with legs, like the life within them had fled.