Our cat always gives the vacuum cleaner a wide berth.

Halt! come down there, you Yanks, come down!

Thus it appears that relative sea-level changes that are both rapid and large scale can only be brought about by glacioisostasy and glacioeustasy, and, so far as we know, major build-ups of continental ice sheets that produced significant volumes of ice are confined to several relatively short periods of the Earth's history in the latest Precambrian, the Ordovician-Silurian, Carboniferous-Permian, and the mid-Cenozoic to the present day.

Smiley peered once more at the flimsy which he still clutched in his pudgy hand.