Patrick Nunn

Imagine you were one of the first groups of people to arrive by boat on an island in the middle of the tropical Pacific Ocean in ancient times.

You had been at sea for weeks, your concern growing as your supplies were exhausted and you had to depend on the fish and the birds you could catch…and the rain that fell from time to time.

Then the high islands you had been searching for appeared faintly over the eastern horizon, so you steered a course towards them.

Quenching your thirst from the rivers you found there, you looked for a ready source of food and found abundant shellfish, clinging to rocks or buried in the sand of the shallow sea floor and the mud of the river estuaries.

You gorged yourself on the soft parts of these shellfish, discarding their hard shells in piles along the shoreline.

And these piles grew. And grew. Until…

Scientists in the 21st century start exploring these remarkable shell middens, revealing history, geography – and the dietary preferences of the people who lived in such places long, long ago.

For thousands of years, Pacific Island communities survived rising seas, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and storms—without satellites, sensors, or climate models.

In this episode of H2O and Beyond, I speak with Patrick Nunn, a geologist who has spent more than three decades working with Pacific Island communities, learning how traditional knowledge preserved real environmental history—and how colonization disrupted it.

We explore how myths and legends are actually encoded memories of past disasters, why many Pacific Islanders historically avoided coastlines, and how modern climate adaptation efforts often fail when they ignore local knowledge. We also discuss why money alone won’t solve climate change, and why the future depends on combining Indigenous knowledge with Western science.

This episode challenges the idea that vulnerable communities are helpless—and asks what we’ve lost by failing to listen.

In this episode, archaeologist Professor Patrick Nunn takes us on a journey through Micronesia’s monumental stonework—from sacred platforms and stone paths to the broader architectural traditions of the Western Pacific.

These structures aren’t just impressive feats of engineering; they’re markers of community, legacy, and cultural continuity.

By comparing regional styles and construction techniques, we uncover how these stone sites reflect a larger story of movement, influence, and innovation across Oceania.

The stones speak—if we know how to listen.

Patrick Nunn has spent his career looking at the scientific evidence of catastrophic natural events that occurred thousands of years ago, like volcanic eruptions, and meteor crashes. He's found that many of these disasters were witnessed by people and their stories were memorised and passed on for thousands of years. Patrick says it's now recognised by science that many of the stories once thought of as 'folk memories' were actually eyewitness accounts, based on observations of a geological phenomenon. The Indigenous people of north-west America remember the creation of Crater Lake, which occurred seven thousand years ago. Aboriginal people recorded the drowning of the Australian coastline, which happened at the end of the last Ice Age. Patrick says the evidence for the factual basis of these events was always there in the stories but, until now, nobody was listening.