Of Moon and Land, Ice and Strand encompasses the four elements constituting the principal directions of Lambeck’s research over the past five decades: the Moon and artificial satellites; the Earth’s surface, crust and deep interior; the ice sheets of the geologically recent past; and aspects of the oceans and the coastal zones. In this lecture, Lambeck shows us what can be learnt from the analysis of past sea-level data, for example complementing glaciological and geological models of past events, or gaining insight into the material behaviour of the Earth (the mantle response function). Most importantly, observations of the ice histories and mantle response functions can be unscrambled to provide models with predictive capabilities, and this has implications for other fields of science like archaeology, pre-history paleogeography and the study of modern sea-level change.