Rapid collaborative knowledge building via Twitter after significant geohazard events

Twitter is an established social media platform valued by scholars as an open way to disseminate scientific information and to publicly discuss research results. Scientific discussions on Twitter are widely viewed by the media who can then pass on information to the public. Here, we take the example of two 2018 earthquake-related events which were widely commented on Twitter by geoscientists: the Palu Mw7.5 earthquake and tsunami in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and the long-duration (more than one year) seismo-volcanic crisis Mayotte island in the Comoros archipelago between Africa and Madagascar. We build our analysis on a content and contextual analysis of selected Twitter threads about the geophysical characteristics of these events. Most authors of this paper have participated to these Twitter threads and related discussions, and regularly explain geohazard events via this social media. From the two selected examples, we show that Twitter promotes very rapid building of knowledge – in the minutes to hours and days following an event – via an efficient exchange of information and active discussion between the scientists themselves and with the public. Combining these results with our own experience of communicating geohazard science via Twitter, we discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of this relatively novel way to make scientific information accessible to scholarly peers and to lay people. We argue that scientific discussion on Twitter breaks down the traditional “ivory towers” of academia. It participates to the growing trends towards open science, making science accessible to any non-academics or citizen scientists who can follow and participate in the discussion. This may help people to understand how science is developed, and, in the case of natural/environmental hazards, to better understand their risks.