An ancient 'ghost city' above the reefs of the Pacific

A reminder that reefs have been living alongside human settlement for far longer than our own records of them.

Coral reefs are not only ecosystems. They are also archives — surfaces that human settlement has built on, fished from and lived beside for centuries.

The story of a 'ghost city' standing above Pacific coral is a reminder of how long that relationship runs, and how much of it we are only now beginning to read.

For a restoration project, this matters. The reef we are working to bring back is not a blank natural system: it is a place with a human history attached to it, and the people who live alongside it today are part of what decides whether it survives.