DMV T-Shirt Art

Denman Marine Voyage T-Shirt Competition

One of my favorite aspects of Antarctic voyages is the creative artwork people produce during our time at sea. On board the RSV Nuyina, our crew and expedition team have a talented group of artists. A tradition on many voyages is creating artwork for a commemorative patch or T-shirt. During my first Antarctic voyage, I designed the voyage patch, while my friend Alison created an impressive T-shirt design.

For this voyage, our leadership organized a competition, but unfortunately, I was too busy with 12-hour shifts and searching for extraterrestrial life to come up with an idea. However, with only two days left in the voting window, inspiration struck – seal tagging and aliens.

One of our science activities on board is seal tagging. While the ARGO network uses autonomous floats to profile ocean chemistry, temperature, and currents worldwide, this task becomes challenging in polar regions due to sea ice and glaciers. A cost-effective and reliable alternative is attaching an oceanographic instrument to a seal’s forehead. Seals avoid ice, dive up to 800 meters, and excel at finding biologically active areas.

The seal tags are glued to the seal’s forehead and eventually shed, hopefully to be recovered, providing valuable data. During the Denman Marine Science campaign, we hope to tag a few seals that will continue collecting data long after we depart.

Although my artwork missed the competition deadline, some crew members and expeditioners expressed interest in turning it into a shirt or sweater design. The artwork explores how seals perceive us, likening our presence to UFOs and aliens. Many seals have likely never seen humans or boats before. Our ship silently enters their territory, and a smaller craft emerges, leaving the seal unconscious and later awakening with an unfamiliar implant attached to its head.

Here’s my design: