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 viewed by the media who can then pass on information to the wider public. Social media is used widely by geoscientists, but there is little documentation currently available regarding the benefits of this to the scientist and the public, or the limitations. 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 Indonesia and the long-duration Mayotte island seismo-volcanic crisis in the Indian Ocean. We build our study on a content and contextual analysis of selected Twitter threads about the geophysical characteristics of these events. From the analysis of these two 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. 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, participates to the growing trends towards open science, and may help people to understand how science is developed, and, in the case of natural/environmental hazards, to better understand their risks