A giant Antarctic ice sheet has been pulled back, revealing a huge colony of glass sponges.
The sponges have skeletons made from silica, "a mineral component of glass," National Geographic reported.
The species is notorious for extremely slow development, but this colony mysteriously tripled in number and doubled in biomass over just two growing periods.
David Barnes, benthic ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge who did not participate in the study, said the species is known for being the "slowest of the slow-growing."
"Now you've got these guys who [are] growing at the rate of tropical sponges," he said.
The sponges popped up when the Larsen A ice shelf disintegrated and collapsed in 2006, shining light on a place that had once been pitch-black.
Despite the obvious changes, researchers are having trouble pinpointing the exact cause of the sponge's rapid growth.
"That is the million-dollar question," Paul Dayton a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography who did not participate in the study, wrote.
Dayton hypothesized the iceberg kept larger plankton from growing, leaving more room for smaller species, the preferred food of glass sponges.
Claudio Richter marine biologist at the Alfred-Wegener Institute and study co-author believes there was an unknown factor inhibiting the sponge's growth which has now been removed.
"The repercussions of all this are quite far-reaching," said Barnes.
Plankton removes carbon from the water when producing food. When the huge colony of glass sponges feed on the plankton carbon gets trapped in the sea floor.
When the sponges die they get buried under the ocean's floor, isolating the already trapped carbon.
"This is a brand-new carbon sink, really," said Barnes.
The small area of ocean containing the glass sponges won't make a huge difference on a global level, but it could interfere with the accuracy of researcher's models used to determine the overall climate.
