My seminar will be about sustainability, coastal resiliency, and past informing future. The Red Sea demarks the parting of the African and the Arabian tectonic plates. Termed a ‘maritime rift’, the Red Sea is unique on the modern Earth and an excellent analog to the opening of the Atlantic Ocean as the supercontinent Pangea broke up beginning about 200 million years ago. Examining the processes at play in the Red Sea sheds light on the mechanisms by which great oceans formed in the geological past. Interest in rifts is considerable – they represent a perfect natural laboratory in which to study plate movements and their related seismicity, and because the deep, narrow basins that they produce represent a rare biosphere, promoting exceptionally high levels of connectivity, diversity, and endemism. The coral reefs which inhabit the Red Sea, for instance, are remarkable in their diversity. They are also some of the most resilient reefs to climate change. The seminar will present findings from a series of missions facilitated by OceanX which have allowed the deep Red Sea to be mapped and sampled in unprecedented detail. Here, I will show how the Red Sea’s beauty is balanced by peril. The steep sides of the rift basin are fragile, seismically active, and submarine landslides can spawn tsunami as large as those of Earth’s most powerful earthquakes, at least locally. So narrow is the Red Sea, that tsunami have little time to dissipate prior to impacting the opposite coastline. Whereas the arid coastline of the Red Sea was sparsely inhabited in antiquity, it is now urbanizing rapidly, and there is compelling urgency to understand the natural hazards that accompany Earth’s only maritime rift basin.