sponge

"If you're a sponge sitting on a nodule and we come and collect you, there will be an impact," he says.

“The biggest thing for me is just to try to be a sponge every day,” Dreyer said.

But where the ice is touching the shelf, there are thousands of tiny creatures like coral, sea slugs and sponge.

“What we do in the industry is use specialized rubber sponges. They’re designed to pick up and capture soot in a specific way that doesn’t damage surfaces. There’s no water involved.”

The paper’s authors coin a new phrase for this phenomenon: the “expanding atmospheric sponge effect.”