Science communication in geosciences has societal and scientific value but often operates in “shadowlands”. This editorial highlights these issues and proposes potential solutions. Our objective is to create a transparent and responsible geoscience communication landscape, fostering scientific progress, the well-being of scientists, and societal benefits.

In this editorial we expand upon the brief advice in the first editorial of Geoscience Communication (Illingworth et al., 2018), illustrating what constitutes robust and publishable work for this journal and elucidating its key elements. Our aim is to help geoscience communicators plan a route to publication and to illustrate how good engagement work that is already being done might be developed into publishable research.

The paper brings a classical debate within the literary scholars' community to a scientific context – the sources that William Shakespeare used for The Tempest. The play is studied in the context of natural hazards, suggesting that geosciences can help to move the debate forward by adding new elements. The paper then collects all the clues that can help to place the island from The Tempest in a Mediterranean context, suggesting that the playwright was a witness to volcanism in the Sicilian sea.

The EMusic project aims to use music as a tool to explain, to a wide audience, the role of geophysics and geology in our society. By means of the sonification of the electromagnetic (EM) response of the Earth, we are able to accompany people on an imaginary voyage into the subsurface so that they can travel into the depths and into the past. In this way, the audience can learn about the geological evolution of the site, which is used as a natural stage, from where the EM data were collected.