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.

Further Information

Patrick is Professor of Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland

The Edge of Memory is published by Bloomsbury