Is it just frustration that makes people hit them so hard? I've seen the same thing with public bathroom hand dryers, people smack the button like it owes them money. We treat public stuff way worse than our own things.

I saw something just like that at Wadi Rum back in 2019. A survey marker we used as a photo spot was completely buried by a dune one year, then sitting on bare rock the next. @noah_smith is right about it being an active unraveling, not just slow. You could literally see new cracks in the bedrock where the sand had been pulled away, like the skin of the earth was peeling off. It makes all those old maps and boundary lines feel pretty temporary.