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Narratives include several characteristics that make them memorable, understandable and enjoyable. Studying how memorable different ways of presenting information can be is a fundamental task for science communication in order to evaluate materials that not only need to be understood by the general public but also retained in the long-term as a part of the knowledge-appropriation process.

We explore how best to support school students to experience undertaking research-level physics by evaluating provision in the PRiSE framework of research in schools projects. These experiences are received by students and teachers much more positively than typical forms of outreach. The intensive support offered is deemed necessary, with all elements appearing equally important. We suggest the framework could be adopted at other institutions applied to their own areas of scientific research.

Results from reviewing 15 popular video games demonstrate a combination of accuracies and inaccuracies that could impact on people’s self-learning of volcanoes. Several volcanic features are represented to varying degrees of accuracy (stratovolcanoes and calderas, lava flows, volcanic ash, and lava bombs), whereas health risks are often inaccurate. Suggested applications of the findings for educational environments are given, such as group projects in open-world games.

We present a new approach in science communication that uses art, such as poetry and ancient music, to entice people to learn about landscapes. Our goal is to promote a deeper understanding of landscapes by integrating their origin and physical aesthetic with their cultural and artistic heritage. We aim to educate people to have a new perception, starting from a site's physical beauty, building on scientific study and cultural history, and arriving at the knowledge of its social importance.

We show that integrating evaluation tools both before and after a drop-in engagement activity enables the demonstration of change and, thus, short-term impact. In our case, young families who listened to space sounds exhibited changed language and conceptions about space in their graffiti wall responses afterwards, exemplifying the power of sound in science communication. We suggest that evaluation tools be adopted both before and after drop-in activities in general.

The potential for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to induce seismicity is a topic of widespread interest. We find that terms used to describe induced seismicity are poorly defined and ambiguous and do not translate into everyday language. Such bad language has led to challenges in understanding, perceiving, and communicating risks around seismicity and fracking. Our findings and recommendations are relevant to other geoenergy topics that are potentially associated with induced seismicity.

Absurd theories have been gaining adherents without any criticism and, worse, consolidating. Thus, in order to find solutions for a better understanding of our real theories, the project "The Earth is Flat! Isn’t it?" was created, Which aims to use performing art as the main communicator to spread science. The first was of integration between science and art. The second was dramaturgy along with the creative process, and the third stage was the spectacle.

The Global South is vulnerable to natural hazards like floods and droughts, but creativity could support community preparedness. We mapped 267 papers that use a variety of art forms. They aim to raise the public's awareness or instigate adaptation by participants. In our pilot in South Africa, community members developed stories about preparing for future drought. This led to an imagination of future events, conversations about adaptation, intergenerational exchange, and increased awareness.

Hertz is an art–science installation allowing the public to experience the hidden vibrations of our planet through infrasound. Infrasound is sound below the human range of hearing produced by geological and atmospheric motion. Real-time recordings of infrasound were played through adapted furniture, which shook to allow the Earth’s inaudible symphony to be experienced. Hertz was exhibited to 7000 participants, of which 85 % felt reconnected to the environment after participating.

Boundary|Time|Surface was an ephemeral art installation providing an opportunity to contemplate the human experience relative to the enormity of time and the fragile and arbitrary nature of human-defined boundaries. Exhibitions derived from the documentation of the original installation provided opportunities for over 25 000 members of the public to interact with the work, both aesthetically and as a source of information on the geological and sociopolitical history of the site.

Air is as valuable a resource as water. We defined a novel index, the Clean aIr Index (CII), to evaluate air cleanliness in terms of a global standard. Japan was chosen as a study area. The air cleanliness of Tokyo was 1.5 and 2.3 times higher than that of Seoul and Beijing, respectively. Extremely clean air occurred to the west of the Pacific coast and in the southern remote islands of Tokyo during summer. CII can be valuable, e.g., for encouraging sightseeing in and migration to fresher air.

The Environment Agency (EA), responsible for flood risk management in England, is moving towards the use of probabilistic river flood forecasts. By showing the likelihood of future floods, they can allow earlier anticipation. But making decisions on probabilistic information is complex and interviews with EA decision-makers highlight the practical challenges and opportunities of this transition. We make recommendations to support a successful transition for flood early warning in England.

An educational program, focusing on seismological activities at schools and on raising citizen awareness of natural hazards, has been active in France since 1995. Over this quarter century, different generations of students have learned various lessons concerning instrument installation, data recording, and analysis. Analysis of earthquakes has generated a strong awareness of the seismic hazard, especially after the deployment of seismometers at schools.

Here we present a science museum, which is special in that it is built around an event in geological time representing a turning point in the planet's history and which brings together the Earth system components. The museum is part of a research complex in the Yucatan Science and Technology Park in Mexico. The museum exhibits on the Chicxulub impact, mass extinction and Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary provide an engaging context for effective geoscience communication, outreach and education.

Postsecondary advanced hydrology students often work with electronic sensing systems at field sites but are rarely given the opportunity to build and test electronic circuits used for collection of environmental data. Students constructed custom-designed circuits for water detection and environmental measurement. The circuits taught students about systems theory and hydrological models. This activity motivated learning and showed how circuits are used to collect data for model application.

An evaluation of the accessibility and equity of a programme of independent research projects shows that, with the right support from both teachers and active researchers, schools' ability to succeed at undertaking cutting-edge research appears independent of typical societal inequalities.

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.

In this study, online entries about earthquakes are analyzed from a popular website in Turkey. The topic of several earthquakes in Turkey and its surrounding areas is the focus of the study. The experiences of the users during the earthquakes are converted into seismic intensity values, which are compared with the models that are used for the prediction of the same metric. It has been found that people's experiences are correlated with the predictions up to certain distances.

This work presents the use of a digital educational resource, CreativeLab_Sci&Math | Plate Tectonics, which explores the PhET^TM Plate Tectonics simulator in the context of pre-service teacher education. Results show that the digital educational resource contributed to pre-service teachers successfully achieving learning outcomes concerning the dynamics of plate tectonics.

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.

We study the impact of an educational seismology program on earthquake awareness and preparedness in Nepal. We see that educational activities implemented in schools are effective at raising awareness levels and in improving adaptive capacities and preparedness for future earthquakes. Knowledge also reached the broader community though social learning, leading to broadscale awareness. The result observed in this study is encouraging for the continuation and expansion of the program.

We use time series data from the first United Kingdom Earth System Model (UKESM1) to create six procedurally generated musical pieces for piano. Each of the six pieces help to explain either a scientific principle or a practical aspect of Earth system modelling. We describe the methods that were used to create these pieces, discuss the limitations of this pilot study and list several approaches to extend and expand upon this work.

At the 14th IEEE International eScience Conference domain specialists and data and computer scientists discussed the road towards open weather and climate science. Open science offers manifold opportunities but goes beyond sharing code and data. Besides domain-specific technical challenges, we observed that the main challenges are non-technical and impact the system of science as a whole.

In order to communicate the field-rich, complex concepts of karst geomorphology and hydrogeology to people who may not be able to access in-person field experiences, two virtual learning resources were created. Both karst activities, introductory and advanced, are available online in the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) Online Field Experiences repository. These and other activities from that SERC repository were incorporated into virtual capstone pathways for senior undergrad students.

Our study is concerned with how the uncertainty in spatial information about environmental variables can be communicated to stakeholders who must use this information to make decisions. We tested five methods for communicating the uncertainty in spatial predictions by eliciting the opinions of end-users about the usefulness of the methods. End-users preferred methods based on the probability that concentrations are below or above a nutritionally significant threshold.

We present the results of a theatre-based project designed to promote gender equity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. We use Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to promote discussions about issues concerning the access, permanence and ascension of women in exact and Earth sciences careers. The scenes are able to show that, in general, these issues relate to other causes, and the paternal culture, and reveal how all kinds of harassment can take place in academia.

Earth Girl Volcano is a casual strategy interactive game about saving communities at risk of volcanic hazards. The easy-to-play game features a friendly animated visual style and an engaging simulation of volcanic events. The game was designed by a multidisciplinary team to appeal to mainstream non-technical audiences, and it was inspired by the experiences of disaster survivors and civil defense teams. Players can learn through gameplay about disaster preparedness and response.

We explore how earthquakes affect everyday life through a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates historical, artistic and scientific perspectives. The effects of distant earthquakes are investigated using data collected on a seismometer located in the Wills Memorial Building tower in Bristol. We also explore historical accounts of earthquakes and their impact on society, and, finally, we use the data collected by the seismometer to communicate artistically the Earth's tectonic movements.

This paper focuses on the use of games and illustrations in scientific outreach. This approach tries to make scientific concepts attractive to the general public by trying to reach people of all ages and social backgrounds. In this work, we would like to give a brief overview of some didactic tools, retracing the choices made while ideating them, thanks mainly to close collaboration with artists and illustrators.

Lack of access to science-based natural hazards information impedes the effectiveness of school-based disaster risk reduction education. To address this challenge, we created and classroom tested a series of earthquake education videos that were co-taught by school teachers and Earth scientists in the UK and Tajikistan. Comparison of the results reveals significant differences between students' views on the Earth's interior and why and where earthquakes occur.

Virtual outcrop models are increasingly used in geoscience teaching, but their efficacy as a training tool for 3D thinking has been little tested. We find that using a virtual outcrop increases the participants' ability to choose the correct geological block model. That virtual outcrops are viewed positively, but only in a blended learning environment and not as a replacement for fieldwork, and virtual outcrop use could improve equality, diversity and inclusivity in geoscience.

The impacts upon a diverse range of students, teachers, and schools from participating in a programme of protracted university-mentored projects based on cutting-edge physics research are assessed. The lasting impacts on confidence, skills, aspirations, and practice suggest that similar research in schools initiatives may have a role to play in aiding the increased uptake and diversity of physics/STEM in higher education as well as meaningfully enhancing the STEM environment within schools.

Ethical issues in science include research misconduct and the rightful treatment of people, animals, the environment and our planet. Based on interviews with 13 scientists, we identify a framework of virtues, and corresponding vices, in modern science. We employ the narrative structure of the late medieval poem The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, and draw on its moral universe to explore the scientific virtues and the role of virtue ethics in science.

We investigate the potential use of Thinglink, an interactive imagery-based web platform, for the study of rocks, minerals, and fossils under the microscope. We disseminated a prototype which allowed users to view rock samples through a "virtual" microscope and gathered feedback from staff and students. Results were overwhelmingly positive and imply real interest in this style of resource. Such resources could help to enhance accessibility and inclusivity and could complement existing teaching.

Earth science (rocks, soils, etc.) is often a subject area that causes concern for many primary school teachers and trainees who lack confidence in teaching it. The article describes and analyses the workshops offered by the Earth Science Education Unit led by enthusiastic Earth scientists. The reactions by participants to the appropriate level of practical suggestions, using cheap resources, shows how continuing professional development workshops provide valuable confidence-building sessions.

This summary of 10 years of INGV’s calendar competitions for primary schools describes an experience of Earth science education through drawings. We have asked children to send drawings about Earth sciences and the dynamics of planet Earth. In addition to the competition, the drawings reflect impressions and thoughts and illustrate the children’s point of view. One can sense a great sensitivity, consideration, responsiveness and respect for the planet and a positive feeling towards science.

In this age of environmental awareness, it is interesting to see how the ecological movement was created by a saint and an artist. The unlikely team of St. Francis and Giotto were revolutionaries – the former, with his ideas on natural philosophy, and the latter, who portrayed the geological landscape in a way that made any viewer aware of the majesty of God's creation. These two created a lasting legacy as they shaped our perspective on the environment over 700 years ago.

One of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology's (INGV) activities is producing resources concerning educational and outreach projects in geophysics and natural hazard projects. Over the past 15 years, graphic and visual communication have become essential tools for supporting institutional and research activities. In this paper, we describe successful INGV team experiences resulting from close relationships and collaborative work between graphic designers and research scientists.

We organized an exhibition on the climate crisis using high-quality images shot by scientists, who are amateur photographers, during their campaigns in glacier regions. Working-age people, attracted by the gorgeous images, received the message that such beauty is in danger of vanishing. Twice, the visitors could talk directly with the experts to discuss geoscience, photography, and aesthetic choices and, of course, climate change, a problem that each of us has to play a part in to solve.

Geoscientists can struggle to communicate with non-geoscientists, especially around contentious geoscience issues. We compare the thoughts and feelings of geoscientists and non-geoscientists around the subsurface, mining/quarrying, drilling and flooding. We find that geoscientists focus more on human interactions when thinking about these processes, while non-geoscientists focus more on economic and environmental impacts. Understanding these differences and similarities can help enable dialogue.