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Some of the preceding comments seem a tad OTT. The full picture is rather more nuanced:

1. "... consistently publishing in terrible journals ... a fringe theorist that can't publish in regular journals". Bunn has been published in reputable journals: Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Journal of New Zealand Studies.
2. "... the article favours Bunn's location theories and rejects other theories" Due weight is given to researchers with differing theories as to location; the article itself rejects none. See pars 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 10.
3. "... Bunn appears to have a commercial interest in promoting his theories, i.e. through his company which apparently wants to excavate the terraces": The evidence shows that the excavation project proposed by the social enterprise (non-commercial) company founded by Bunn was suspended in 2014.

Still, I grant that some of the references are in need of more reliable sources. I will provide those for references 36, 37 and 38, and do welcome discussion of the reliability of any other source.

The prevailing view in the years following the 1886 eruption was that the terraces had been destroyed and that they would never be seen again.^[1][2] However, there were some, Chief Guide Warbrick principal among them, who continued to maintain that they had survived, buried beneath a deposit of mud and volcanic ash, although none was able to produce any evidence to support claims of survival.^[3]

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 lowest two tiers of the terraces were reported found at 60 metres (200 ft) deep. A part of the White Terraces was also reported as rediscovered in June 2011..^[4][5]

The 2011 GNS claims of rediscovery were challenged by Bill Keir, a freelance researcher, who calculated that the 'rediscovered' structures were not where the terraces had been before the eruption and speculated that they were either prehistoric terraces or step-shaped objects created by the eruption. Keir's speculations were rebutted by Cornel de Ronde, Research Geologist at GNS Science.^[6][7]

In February 2014, Rex Bunn, an independent researcher, founded PAWTL (Pink & White Terraces Limited), a social enterprise company, with the objective of draining the lake and recovering the in situ terraces, relying on the GNS locations. 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,^[8] However, after GNS advised of the risk of an eruption, the project was suspended.^[9]

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. In that paper, they retracted their previous claims of rediscovery and concluded that "the majority of both sets of terraces were destroyed".^[10]

Later in 2016, in December, Bunn and Nolden published a paper that drew on Nolden's discovery in 2010 of Hochstetter's original maps to suggest the locations may have survived the eruption.^[11] 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.^[12]

A paper by Keir in December 2017 disputed Bunn and Nolden's findings and contended that the terraces could not have survived intact.^[13]

Tūhourangi Tribal Authority chairman Alan Skipwith, speaking after TV3 in March 2018 had referred to the terraces' "discovery", thanked Bunn and Nolden for their research that potentially proved the location of the terraces but stated that the Authority was in no position to conclusively identify a location.^[14] Two researchers from NIWA, acknowledging the relevance of their research to the Tūhourangi iwi, disputed the location of the terraces using Hochstetter's mapping;^[15] Bunn countered with a commentary that pointed out errors in their findings and their conclusion that the terraces were destroyed.^[16]

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.^[17]

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".^[18]

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. This evidence included the first altimetric measurements of the landscape, triangulation of coordinates for the White Terrace, mātauranga Māori knowledge, and the analysis of a recently restored pre-eruption photograph by pioneer photographer Wiliam Fitzgerald Crawford.^[19][20][21] A major conclusion was that the White Terraces presently lie buried on the existing Lake Rotomahana shoreline outside the 1886 crater and that excavation of the terraces is feasible.^[22][23]