2060: After nearly three decades, the Flood, the ecological disaster mankind had wrought upon the Earth, has finally come to an end. After nearly a decade of work in Greenland, Antarctica, Kazakhstan, and the Sahara Desert, as well as several smaller projects from Utah to the Great Rift Valley, humans were able to finally reduce Sea Levels to pre-flood levels.

While humans succeeded at healing the Ozone layer and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to pre-industrial levels, the damage was done. Worldwide flooding from polar melting continued for much of the first half of the 21st Century, rising to an additional 9 m with the melting of the South Greenland Ice Sheet. This intial melt off was just low enough for most of the world's major cities to counter it with large sea walls, though many areas like the Netherlands, Flanders, Venice, Bangladesh, and much of the Louisiana and Floridian coastlines were lost to the sea. The initial flooding sent millions from their homes, and displaced whole populations. By 2040 the crisis was pushed beyond the limits of the sea walls with the loss of the majority of the Antarctic Ice Shelves. and West Antarctic Ice Sheet, pushing sea levels to 30 meters above pre-Flood levels. This event event drove many existing crisis past the tipping point, and driving the major powers of the planet to war.

In 2043, eight years before the outbreak of War, a consortium of businesses, NGOs and governments set out upon an ambitious project to apply terraforming techniques being used on Mars and Venus to Earth. The project began with the positioning of several solar shields in polar orbit above the North and South Poles. The Shields would allow for a rapid drop in polar temperatures and return the North and South polar ice within a decade. The shields would not return the Glaciers of the South Greenland Ice Sheet, however, only enough snow and ice to reflect the sun and prevent subsurface melting. This remaining 9 m of water would have to be drained into new manmade bodies. Three artificial basins were created in Chad and Algeria, while the existing Aral Sea was dug out to allow its water to remain. The excess of sand and rock would be used to reconstruct the world's beaches, and create hills around the new Seas to create an artificial rain-shadow effect. New forests and grasslands were planted along the Kanduna river's expanded tributary, and around the new seas to further promote a healthy biosphere.

WWIII came and went, lasting only a few years, thankfully, due to advances in precision weapons technology. And shortly after the war's end the new basin's began to service the draining flood waters. New Nation's sprung up around the new tributaries and inland seas, servicing peoples who had never been given a fair share of Earth's bounty. Today the Seas have saved mankind from oblivion and returned the lost cities and coastlines to the Earth, but the damage has been done, and it will take many decades still to rebuild these washed away lands, and battle for the newly fertile lands has added a new chapter in mankind's history.