Geonews: Timely geoscience educational YouTube videos about recent geologic events

Abstract

Geologic events like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis hurt nearby people and stimulate the curiosity of people farther away, thus providing opportunities to engage the public to be more interested to learn about Earth processes. Geoscientists are increasingly using social media such as Twitter to explain to the public what caused these events, and videos provide an especially vivid way to reach this audience. However, it is still unclear how to create, evaluate, and disseminate videos on timely natural events to communicate geosciences. To address this challenge and opportunity, we analyzed the impact of 33 short geoscience educational (GeoEd) videos that we created and posted on YouTube between 2018 and 2020. These include 12 videos on timely geologic events (denoted Geonews videos) and 21 videos that are not specially about timely geologic topics (denoted General GeoEd videos), all of which were similarly advertised and have similar lengths. By comparing the performance of the Geonews and General GeoEd videos, we conclude the following points: (1) the YouTube audience is consistently interested in Geonews videos, but some General GeoEd videos are more popular; (2) Geonews videos may trigger more meaningful dialogues than General GeoEd videos, especially for local audiences; (3) the "golden period"of Geonews videos engaging YouTube audiences is within 3 weeks after posting; (4) the Geonews audience tends to be younger and more diverse than the General GeoEd video audience; (5) creating Geonews videos can be a promising strategy for geoscientists to engage public audiences on YouTube-like social media.