Built for jobs requiring a wear life of or more, it's tough enough to handle harsh impact applications with wear material designed for long life in abrasive conditions.
He showed me a photo of a skull from the 2000 trip and another photo of it in the same spot five years later. Much of the bone had been ground away -- literally sandblasted.
The lakes are lapping their granite shores and wearing them away, and every one of these rills and young rivers is fretting the air into music, and carrying the mountains to the plains.
For as long as a forward edge of a worm's ring segment was held open by a hook, open to admit abrasive sand into the more sensitive interior, the creature would not retreat beneath the desert.