Seismological Outreach Activities on Social Media: A Long-Term Review

Abstract This contribution summarizes our outreach activities on social media over the last decade, focused on presenting seismic data acquired with various seismometer types to students and the general public. With this approach, we aim to highlight the importance of data acquisition for subsequent tasks, such as numerical modeling and tectonic interpretation. Much of this outreach activity has focused on displaying seismic waves generated by local, regional, and distant earthquakes, often using data acquired by an educational seismic network deployed in northeastern Spain. We consider these outreach activities useful, especially in countries with low-to-moderate seismic activity, where the general public is unfamiliar with earthquakes. Furthermore, during our outreach activities, we have focused on ground vibrations generated by nontectonic natural processes and anthropogenic sources. Posts related to so-called environmental seismology often attract public attention, as it is generally unknown that a variety of natural processes can be monitored using seismic data. Vibrations generated by human activity, from those generated by students moving between classrooms to those related to crowd movement during music concerts or football matches, also attract a great deal of attention, often including the mass media. We try to use the interest in these events as an opportunity to bring Earth sciences closer to society.