Another reason why internal reflection may be less than total, even beyond the critical angle, is that the external medium may be "lossy" (less than perfectly transparent), in which case the external medium will absorb energy from the evanescent wave, so that the maintenance of the evanescent wave will draw power from the incident wave. The consequent less-than-total reflection is called attenuated total reflectance (ATR). This effect, and especially the frequency-dependence of the absorption, can be used to study the composition of an unknown external medium.