One of the aspects of my job that I really love is that I get to make maps and cross-sections of what parts of the world used to be like in the past. Lost islands, eroded mountain ranges, infilled rifts...

I can draw maps showing the vegetation and the distribution of land and sea and I can populate these with notional creatures. Palm-fringed tropical islands are one of my favourites.

At the moment I'm working just offshore Borneo on an area that used to have low hills just like those onshore now, but they were washed away by the sea beating on the coastline over the past 5 million years. Now the area is sea, but 15,000 years ago it was land - probably a mangrove swamp, with a huge estuary cutting through it and salt creeks flooding with every tide. We can image these beautifully on 3D seismic datasets and visually recreate the past.

Even just looking at the geologically recent, there is a lot of action. Ice ages come and go and sea level shifts by over 100m, turning The Java Sea into a vast fertile swamp, or flooding the land in a future "what if" of global melting.

If a catastrophic melting of the icecaps occurred, I would have a house overlooking a quiet ria - a tidal inlet of the sea. I could sail my fictional yacht between the flooded roofs of the houses across the street.

(of course, if it was *really* catastrophic, the tidal wave would wash my whole street away)