[2] They disappeared in the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera and were generally thought to have been destroyed, until evidence emerged in the early twenty-first century of their survival.

[3] The Pink and White Terraces were formed by upwelling geothermal springs containing a cocktail of silica-saturated, near-neutral pH chloride water.

[5] The main tourist attractions included Ngahapu, Ruakiwi, Te Tekapo, Waikanapanapa, Whatapoho, Ngawana, Koingo and Whakaehu.

[6] The process of formation of the Pink and White Terraces was described by geology professor Marshall of Otago University: "The water is alkaline, and contains much silica in solution.

Tourists preferred to bathe in the upper Pink Terrace pools as due to their clarity and the range of temperature and depths.

[14] Those who made the journey to the terraces were most frequently well-to-do, young male overseas tourists or officers from the British forces in New Zealand.

[15] The list of notable tourists included Sir George Grey in 1849, Alfred Duke of Edinburgh in 1869, and Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope in 1874.

[27][28] After methodically examining the region over the months following the eruption, along with a number of government experts, Percy Smith declared that either the terraces were buried under stone, or else had sunk into the main crater.

[32] Although active searching for the terraces had long ceased, in February 2011 a team of researchers from GNS Science, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and Waikato University reported discovering part of the Pink Terraces in the course of their mapping the floor of Lake Rotomahana with a REMUS underwater vehicle.

The company was to be operated by the Tūhourangi and Ngati Rangitihi Arawa hapū that had been associated with tourist ventures to the Terraces in the nineteenth century, However, after GNS advised of the risk of an eruption, the project was suspended.

[37] In March 2016, the GNS team published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research results of returns to the site in 2012 and 2014.

[38] In a follow-up paper published in June 2017 in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Bunn and Nolden concluded that, contrary to the prevailing belief, the Pink and White Terraces were not submerged beneath Lake Rotomahana, but were instead buried 10 to 15 metres (33 to 49 ft) underground along the shoreline, and could potentially be excavated and restored to public view, dependent on the permission of the Māori iwi which owned the land.

[43] In June 2018, a paper by Bunn, Davies and Stewart used a novel "field of view" approach to establish "with maximum possible accuracy" the locations of the terraces, taking previously unpublished photographs from Hochstetter's 1859 expedition, along with his diary entries, as reference points.

[44] Later in 2018, de Ronde, Tontini and Keam contended that the locations identified in Bunn and Nolden's 2016 and 2017 papers were unsupported by their own analyses, which indicated that the terraces "largely would have been destroyed".

[45] Between 2019 and 2024, Bunn and fellow researchers published books and papers that accumulated a body of evidence for the survival of the terraces in the locations that they had identified.