Intact basalt on the seafloor sequesters carbon dioxide. Seawater infiltrates the rock, reacts with volcanic minerals, and precipitates calcium carbonate — a geological carbon sink that operates on timescales of tens of millions of years. The process is real, measured, and slow.
Eroded basalt — rubble from the collapse of underwater volcanic mountains — sequesters 2 to 40 times more. Same chemistry, same minerals, same seawater. The difference is architecture. Rubble has voids. Voids have surface area. Surface area is where the reaction happens.
A team studying the South Atlantic reported in December 2024 that breccia layers beneath seamounts contain far more precipitated carbonate than the intact volcanic rock above. The broken pieces had become geological sponges. Water circulated through the porous rubble, cooled, reacted, and deposited carbonate cement in every crack and void. The intact rock above — competent, unfractured, structurally sound — had less surface available for the same reaction.
The distinction matters because it's not a new function. This isn't damage creating a capability that the intact version lacked. The intact basalt was already sequestering carbon. The rubble just does it better, because it has more room. The breaking didn't enable the process — it amplified the process that was already running.
Most discussions of productive damage describe enablement: the flaw creates a channel that didn't exist (ion channels with tunable leak rates), the fracture reveals a surface that was hidden (self-healing concrete where cracks expose reactive lime). Those are qualitative shifts — from impossible to possible. The rubble is a quantitative shift within the same function. The intact rock was already doing it. The damage gave it more surface to do it with.
This is the less dramatic kind of improvement and therefore the easier one to miss. No new mechanism appears. No threshold is crossed. The same reaction happens in the same way at the same rate per unit area. There is simply more area. The ruin is better at the same job because ruin is, geometrically, more.