Patrick Nunn

Ancient coastal tales reveal deep memories of land, sea, and survival.
What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches, and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change—floods, land loss, and shifting shorelines—carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. With clarity and insight, it also brings to life the tellers and collectors of these stories, tracing how oral knowledge endured even as literacy spread. It is a compelling invitation to listen again to old stories, and to hear what the land and sea remember.

The traces of much of human history – and that which preceded it – lie beneath the ocean surface; broken up, dispersed, often buried and always mysterious. This is fertile ground for speculation, even myth-making, but also a topic on which geologists and climatologists have increasingly focused in recent decades. We now know enough to tell the true story of some of the continents and islands that have disappeared throughout Earth's history, to explain how and why such things happened, and to unravel the effects of submergence on the rise and fall of human civilizations.

In Worlds in Shadow Patrick Nunn sifts the facts from the fiction, using the most up-to-date research to work out which submerged places may have actually existed versus those that probably only exist in myth. He looks at the descriptions of recently drowned lands that have been well documented, those that are plausible, and those that almost certainly didn't exist.

Going even further back, Patrick examines the presence of more ancient lands, submerged beneath the waves in a time that even the longest-reaching folk memory can't touch. Such places may have played important roles in human evolution, but can only be reconstructed through careful geological detective work. Exploring how lands become submerged, whether from sea-level changes, tectonic changes, gravity collapse, giant waves or volcanoes, helps us determine why, when and where land may disappear in the future, and what might be done to prevent it.

In today's society it is generally the written word that holds the authority. We are more likely to trust the words found in a history textbook over the version of history retold by a friend - after all, human memory is unreliable, and how can you be sure your friend hasn't embellished the facts? But before humans were writing down their knowledge, they were telling it to each other in the form of stories. The Edge of Memory celebrates the predecessor of written information - the spoken word, tales from our ancestors that have been passed down, transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next. Among the most extensive and best-analysed of these stories are from native Australian cultures. These stories conveyed both practical information and recorded history, describing a lost landscape, often featuring tales of flooding and submergence. These folk traditions are increasingly supported by hard science. Geologists are starting to corroborate the tales through study of climatic data, sediments and land forms; the evidence was there in the stories, but until recently, nobody was listening. In this book, Patrick Nunn unravels the importance of these tales, exploring the science behind folk history from various places - including northwest Europe and India - and what it can tell us about environmental phenomena, from coastal drowning to volcanic eruptions. These stories of real events were passed across the generations, and over thousands of years, and they have broad implications for our understanding of how human societies have developed through the millennia, and ultimately how we respond collectively to changes in climate, our surroundings and the environment we live in.

Islands-as well as entire continents-are reputed to have disappeared in many parts of the world. Yet there is little information on this subject concerning its largest ocean, the Pacific. Over the years, geologists have amassed data that point to the undeniable fact of islands having disappeared in the Pacific, a phenomenon that the oral traditions of many groups of Pacific Islanders also highlight. There are even a few instances where fragments of Pacific continents have disappeared, becoming hidden from view rather than being submerged. In this scientifically rigorous yet readily comprehensible account of the fascinating subject of vanished islands and hidden continents in the Pacific, the author ranges far and wide, from explanations of the region's ancient history to the meanings of island myths. Using both original and up-to-date information, he shows that there is real value in bringing together myths and the geological understanding of land movements. A description of the Pacific Basin and the "ups and downs" of the land within its vast ocean is followed by chapters explaining how-long before humans arrived in this part of the world-islands and continents that no longer exist were once present. A succinct account is given of human settlement of the region and the establishment of cultural contexts for the observation of occasional catastrophic earth-surface changes and their encryption in folklore. The author also addresses the persistent myths of a "sunken continent" in the Pacific, which became widespread after European arrival and were subsequently incorporated into new age and pseudoscience explanations of our planet and its inhabitants. Finally, he presents original data and research on island disappearances witnessed by humans, recorded in oral and written traditions, and judged by geoscience to be authentic. Examples are drawn from throughout the Pacific, showing that not only have islands collapsed, and even vanished, within the past few hundred years, but that they are also liable to do so in the future. [Book Synopsis]

A major reason for writing this book is to describe the evidence for last-millennium climate change and its effects on environments and societies from the Pacific Basin, a commonly marginalized region in global syntheses. The paucity of palaeoclimate datasets from the southern hemisphere has often been remarked upon, and many palaeoclimatologists have cautioned that their statements about global last-millennium (and earlier) climate change should be regarded as preliminary until a better balance is achieved. Yet there is also a marked west-east hemispheric imbalance between the Pacific third of the Earth and elsewhere, largely because the Pacific is mostly ocean, but also because there have been fewer scientific investigations of its recent palaeoclimatic history. In seeking to redress these imbalances, this book utilizes data about Pacific Basin palaeoclimate from numerous sources. Many of these data are imprecise, their relationships to presumed climate drivers often uncertain. For such reasons, some of the conclusions reached about last-millennium Pacific Basin climates are less compelling than would be ideal, not just for comparing with other parts of the world but also for testing whether or not particular changes were global in extent, globally or hemispherically synchronous, or otherwise constrained in time or space. Yet there are more than adequate data to produce a first synthesis for this vast and poorly researched region, a synthesis that the author regards as sufficiently compelling to command the attention of geoscientists, climatologists, geographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and historians interested in the Pacific. It is important to recognize that in the Pacific Basin - as in other parts of the world - the study of last-millennium climates is constrained by the effective reach of particular techniques back in time. Obviously, the last hundred years or so, for which there are instrumental records of climate in many places, is the least controversial time period. Beyond the reach of such directly monitored data series, it is necessary to use proxy data. There are three types of proxy used: those that directly proxy climate variables (typically temperature and precipitation), those that proxy climate through an environmental filter and finally those that proxy either climate or climate-driven environmental changes through changes in human societies. [Book Synopsis]

Talk of the human-enhanced greenhouse effect and the ways in which it may affect our lives has made many people more aware of environmental change. We have come to realize that the environment is and has always bean in a state of continuous change, and that we and other organisms have had to adjust our lifestyles accordingly. This book focuses on the Pacific Basin, a vast region which can be considered a microcosm of the entire surface of the Earth and which has suffered from being marginalized in most accounts of Earth-surface processes and phenomena. In this book, the Pacific Basin includes the Pacific Ocean and Islands and also the Pacific Rim which is divided into the subregions of Antarctica, South America, Central America, North America, Beringia, East Asia and Australasia. Professor Nunn begins by outlining the distant origins of the modern Pacific Basin more than 1000 million years ago, then traces its development through the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic into the Cenozoic Era. For this time - the last 66 million years - the history of environmental change becomes progressively better known. For the last 1.8 million years (the Quaternary period), the Earths climate has oscillated between warm and cool, producing synchronous environmental changes throughout most of the Pacific Basin. The importance of volcanism and tectonics (land-level movements) - for which the Pacific Basin is well known - as causes of environmental change is explained in detail. The effects of human activities on most Pacific Basin environments began to be registered only during the Holocene - the last 12 000 years - culminating in the environmental crisis which currently afflicts many parts of this region. While the role of humans in altering Pacific Basin environments is discussed in detail, considerable attention is also given to the ways in which environmental change caused changes to human lifestyles which had far-reaching consequences.