The Shear Zone Channel – reflections on sharing geological science on YouTube

YouTube hosts several collections of videos that focus on topical geological topics. This presentation is concerned with viewer engagement around content on one of these. The Shear Zone channel, as of January 2026, has over 15k subscribers with over 1.25M views across its ~300 videos. Launched as a platform for sharing educational content aimed at university earth science students, over its five-year existence, films have evolved to a more documentary style and accessed increasingly by broader communities outside formal education environments. Although viewing figures, compared with some other popular YouTubers are not astronomical, some have attracted >>25k views with full views running at >18% (which is high for YouTube!). Comments are permitted, though moderated – which, along with “likes” and channel analytics – give insight on the reach, popularity, opinions and background of viewers.

To lever YouTube algorithms, content is monetised by permitting advertising at the start of each video but not with commercial breaks mid-programme, which can degrade viewer experience. Non-monetised content is marginalised by the platform. YouTube also has very strong recency bias in the content it reveals and it promotes content that attracts viewer engagement and retention. While there is long-term, recurrent viewer engagement for short-course teaching materials on The Shear Zone, views of the broader documentary style material generally die off after a few days. Very few users explore content by access channel home-pages or playlists – hence the preponderance of rather sensationalist thumbnails used by other content-creators to attract views. This presentation reports viewer engagement on a subset of content published on The Shear Zone channel.

In April-May 2024, the BBC’s broadcast the fourth series of Race Across The World, advertised as a journey through “The Ring of Fire in east and south-east Asia.  Independent of this, as the series developed, I dropped two videos each week, appropriate to that particular segment of the race, on YouTube. Meta-tagged to RATW, these covered topics as diverse as megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis, Holocene sea-level change, palaeogeographic assembly of SE Asia, volcanic eruptions and biogeography. Views ranged from around 2k to 25k, the most popular being a video on Krakatoa. Interestingly the tie-in to RATW seems to have yielded rather few views – most of the audience came from E and SE Asia!

More popular videos have attracted disproportionate comment from what politely might be called adherents to non-mainstream geoscience ideas – even when these are only tangentially associated with the video contents. Two films have attracted particular attention: The disappearing glaciers of Mont Blanc (published August 2022); and Trashing continental drift (in two parts; published September 2025). These commentaries provide useful insights on the types of evidence and information used by these communities and the challenge of communicating science when contested.