Since you are not an expert, you should not make blanket claims like "The issue is there is so little research on water levels". All you can say is that you don't know what research there is on water levels.

The Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth gives some information about "localized water levels aligned with older civilizations".

One of them concerns the flooding of the Persian Gulf, with a link to http://z6.ifrm.com/4802/123/0/p1011060/Persian_Gulf_Oasis.pd... which posits that the gulf was an oasis during the Ice Age. If you read the paper you'll see the commentary on page 870:

> The notion that coastal regions are more attractive than adjacent hinterlands because of moderate climates, abundant groundwater, ecological diversity and fertility on land, and marine resources; that such regions have been critically important as pacemakers of socioeconomic and demographic change throughout prehistory; and that their role has been largely ignored or misjudged because of sea-level change, has been widely canvassed by archaeologists during the past decade both in general terms and in relation to the Arabian Peninsula (Bailey 2009; Bailey and Flemming 2008; Bailey and Milner 2002; Bailey et al. 2008; Erlandson 2001, 2007; Erlandson and Fitzpatick 2006; Westley and Dix 2006; Westley et al. 2010).

which gives several papers you can track down.

On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth you'll see mention of 'localized flooding at Shuruppak (modern Tell Fara, Iraq) and various other Sumerian cities' which is believed to be a 'localised event caused through the damming of the Kurun through the spread of dunes, flooding into the Tigris, and simultaneous heavy rainfall in the Nineveh region, spilling across into the Euphrates. In Israel, there is no such evidence of a widespread flood.'

If you then wade though the various sites which claim this is evidence of the Biblical flood, you'll come across sites like http://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/reflections-on-the-m... , which point out that there's a long history of flooding in the area:

> There was one such appalling disaster for example, in 1954, when an exceptionally rainy spring combined with the melting snows of Armenia and Kurdistan, so swelled the Tigris River that it submerged the low-lying plain for hundreds of miles, and all Baghdad was in imminent danger of destruction. ...

> All in all, therefore, it is justifiable to conclude from the present evidence, as does Max Mallowan in his recent thoughtful and comprehensive article, “Noah’s Flood Reconsidered” (Iraq, vol. XXVI, 1964, pages 62-83) that the Mesopotamian Flood-story, and the Old Testament version based on it, was inspired by an actual catastrophic but by no means universal disaster that took place, not as Woolley claimed, immediately after the Ubaid period, but some time about 3000 B.C., and that it left its archaeological traces in Kish, Shuruppak, and probably at a good many other places yet to be discovered.

So there are a lot of changes in 'localized water levels' in places where there are ancient civilizations. The question this becomes what kind of changes are you looking for?

Another well-known example of post-glacial flooding of settled human lands is Doggerland. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland .

Still another is Sundaland. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland . Quoting from http://phys.org/news/2008-05-dna-evidence-overturns-populati... :

> Dr Oppenheimer’s book, based on multidisciplinary evidence, writes about the effects of the drowning of a huge ancient continent called ‘Sundaland’ (that extended the Asian landmass as far as Borneo and Java). This happened during the period 15,000 to 7,000 years ago following the last Ice Age. He outlines how rising sea levels in three massive pulses caused flooding and the submergence of the Sunda Continent, creating the Java and South China Seas and the thousands of islands that make up Indonesia and the Philippines today.

In other words, there's a large amount of literature and research on the topic, and as easy to access as most other published scientific literature.

You write about caving robots and ground penetrating radar. That would provide little useful data for the cost. Ground penetrating radar does not work through water, so cannot find submerged sites. While geophysics is important for archaeology, ground penetrating radar mostly used to prioritize manual inspection. And if you read the article about the research in the Indian Ocean you'll see that isotope analysis of core samples an other techniques were very important in the research. I think your views on 'automated exploring bots' is only an expression of techno-optimism.