GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

INGVterremoti: the communication is a risk, the silence is a fault A. Amato, L. Arcoraci, E. Casarotti, V. Lauciani, C. Meletti, C. Nostro, A. Piersanti, M. Pignone, L. Postpischl Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Roma, Italy Introduction. In the last few years, the need for an improved scientific communication has emerged strongly. In various fields of science, including biology, medical science, agronomy, food science, seismology and many others, the diffusion of clear, updated and solid information to society has become more and more important. We have seen how the spreading of uncorrect and false news about some natural or anthropic processes may be misleading for society. Controversial issues like those raised (among many others) by the “Stamina” case (AA.VV ., 2013), the “cold fusion”, the chemtrails, earthquakes falsely predicted (Nostro et al. , 2012), or attributed to strange processes such as HAARP, etc., have shown that without a proper and continuous scientific information people’s awareness about real risks cannot increase, but rather it is deviated on other topics, often irrelevant or misleading. In the field of natural hazards, and in particular earthquakes, it is clear that without an authoritative source about their occurrence, their size, their source, their cause, people often tend to look for information on unreliable channels, with the result of increased confusion, conflicting and wrong information, and so on. This is especially critical immediately after an earthquake felt by the population, when the search for data and information is amplified by the rush and by the fear. For the reasons above, INGV decided to improve the release of earthquake information, particularly after the L’Aquila event in 2009, and even more after the Po Plain earthquake in 2012. Both earthquakes raised relevant problems about the delicate issues of scientific and risk communication. Besides the traditional web pages published after relevant earthquakes, and more in general to describe seismological research and projects (on www.ingv.it) , several new social channels were activated. A Facebook page was opened soon after the L’Aquila earthquake to inform about aftershock activity, originally named “Terremoto oggi”, then changed to INGVterremoti. Between 2009 and 2010, both a Twitter account and a Youtube channel “INGVterremoti” were opened. In the meantime, an app for iPhone was developed and opened in 2011, while in 2012 a blog named INGVterremoti was activated, during the Po Plain earthquake sequence. In this paper we describe each of these media, describing their targets, their history and statistics, the contents and the future developments. As described later, our feeling is that they had a good success (in some cases extremely good) in terms of number of people involved, followers grow rate, and degree of acceptance in the public. Since 2012, we have been working for increasing the interconnection between our different social media, sharing contents and including them in a common web page on earthquakes (terremoti.ingv.it) . Twitter/INGVterremoti. The importance of twitter as a fast and widespread tool to disseminate and retrieve information on a variety of topics is well known. In the filed of natural hazard and in particular earthquakes, it emerged as an important source of information (Earle et al. , 2011; Bruns et al. , 2012). The INGVterremoti twitter account was activated in 2009 to release rapid information on current seismicity in Italy. The account is directly connected to the database of the seismic monitoring room at INGV. As soon as an earthquake is revised by the seismologists on shift, earthquake parameters are published on the INGV web sites (cnt.rm.ingv.it and iside.rm.ingv.it) and sent via twitter. Typical time intervals between earthquake occurrence and dispatch of the revised messages are between 5 and 20 minutes. We are aware that this is a long time for large earthquakes, when thousands or even millions of people feel the shaking in a few seconds after a quake. For this reason we are testing automatic, faster procedures. Automatic locations are 343 GNGTS 2013 S essione 2.3