Little Red Spot

I did an earlier post on the behavior of sand dunes. see: At Resonance Frequency: Liquid Dunes

In this entry, I was looking at how a small sand dune can strike a larger dune and actually emerge from the other side of the big dune. The explanation from wikipedia about how these small dunes can emerge from larger dunes follows:
"As barchan dunes migrate, smaller dunes outpace larger dunes, bumping into the rear of the larger dune and eventually appear to punch through the large dune to appear on the other side. The process seems to be similar to waves of light, sound or water that pass directly through each other; the detailed mechanism is, however, very different, being nonlinear. These are known as solitons.

"The dunes emulate soliton behavior but unlike solitons, the sand particles do not pass through each other. When the smaller dune rear-ends the larger dune, the winds begin to deposit sand on the rear dune while blowing sand off the front dune without replenishing it. Eventually, the rear dune has assumed dimensions similar to the former front dune which has now become a smaller, faster moving dune that pulls away with the wind. (Schwämmle & Herrmann, 2003)"

This is just like the recent phenomenon on Jupiter. The great red spot of Jupiter is an enormous, and somewhat permanent storm that has been present since man has been watching Jupiter through the first telescopes. Recently, there was a new storm that formed, that they called The Little Red Spot. The little red spot ran into the big red spot and emerged from the other side. This reminded me of the dune behavior above.

How can something merge completely, yet something remains of the original, and then is reborn out the other side? What can you think of in life that is like this?