This means that the exposures are temporary.

A surface that is visible this year may be covered again by advancing dune sand next year, or it may be further deflated and eventually destroyed by erosion over the following decade.

The pace of new exposure and the pace of destruction are both continuing processes, and the management of the scientific resource at White Sands requires ongoing monitoring and rapid response when new surfaces appear.

It also means that substantial portions of the ancient lakebed surface — including sections that may contain extensive additional trackways — are currently under the dunes, inaccessible to surface investigation.

Ground-penetrating radar and other subsurface sensing methods have been used to begin characterizing what lies beneath the current surface, but the scale of the buried landscape is enormous relative to the resources available for its investigation.

The implication is that what has been found so far at White Sands is almost certainly a fraction of what is there to be found.