[2][3] The daughter of a Royal Navy officer, Bunbury studied Natural Sciences at Durham University, where she specialised in geology and geophysics, and realised she enjoyed fieldwork.
Bunbury worked on a new project at University of Cambridge in development of mass spectrometry equipment to estimate how the rocks of the Himalayas were dissolving.
It was development of methods to apply geological auger boring techniques to these sites, as well as photographs from the air and satellites, that led to a new consensus that the course of the river in the Nile valley had moved very substantially over the millennia, causing profound impacts such as on the location of buildings.
[4] She works in collaboration with archaeologists to characterise the materials found in cores of sediments in sites in Egypt, especially the Nile Valley and other places of archaeological interest.
This led to reinterpretation of landscapes such as the Valley of the Kings as having trees, lakes and animal life 3500 years ago, rather than being sand deserts.