EGU2020-5261
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-5261
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Rapid collaborative knowledge building via Twitter after significant geohazard events

Robin Lacassin1, Maud Devès1, Stephen P. Hicks2, Jean-Paul Ampuero3, Rémy Bossu4, Lucile Bruhat5, Daryono Daryono6, Desianto F. Wibisono7, Laure Fallou4, Eric J. Fielding8, Alice-Agnes Gabriel9, Jamie Gurney10, Janine Krippner11, Anthony Lomax12, Muh. Ma'rufin Sudibyo13, Astyka Pamumpuni14, Jason R Patton15, Helen Robinson16, Mark Tingay17, and Sotiris Valkaniotis18
Robin Lacassin et al.
  • 1Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Univ. Paris Diderot, Paris, France (lacassin@ipgp.fr)
  • 2Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
  • 3Université Côte d’Azur, IRD, CNRS, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Géoazur, France
  • 4European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, France
  • 5Laboratoire de Géologie, Ecole normale supérieure, PSL Research University, CNRS, Paris, France
  • 6Earthquake and Mitigation Division, Agency for Meteorology Climatology and Geophysics, Indonesia
  • 7Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia
  • 8Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA
  • 9Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
  • 10United Kingdom Earthquake Bulletin, United Kingdom
  • 11Global Volcanism Program, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA
  • 12ALomax Scientific, Mouans-Sartoux, France
  • 13Kebumen Natural Disaster Response, Kebumen, Central Java, Indonesia
  • 14Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia
  • 15Department of Geology, Humboldt State University, California, USA
  • 16Powerful Earth, United Kingdom
  • 17University of Adelaide, Australia
  • 18Koronidos 9, 42131 Trikala, Greece

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.

How to cite: Lacassin, R., Devès, M., Hicks, S. P., Ampuero, J.-P., Bossu, R., Bruhat, L., Daryono, D., Wibisono, D. F., Fallou, L., Fielding, E. J., Gabriel, A.-A., Gurney, J., Krippner, J., Lomax, A., Sudibyo, Muh. M., Pamumpuni, A., Patton, J. R., Robinson, H., Tingay, M., and Valkaniotis, S.: Rapid collaborative knowledge building via Twitter after significant geohazard events, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-5261, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-5261, 2020.

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