EGU Public Engagement Grants are awarded each year to Union members interested in developing an outreach project to raise awareness of the geosciences outside the scientific community. For 2022, the EGU Outreach Committee has named three €1500 grant winners. Spanning a range of topics from underwater seismology to crowdsourced climate data to investigative geoscience, and using a range of innovative outreach formats to speak with their chosen audiences, the 2022 winners of the EGU Public Engagement Grants represent the enthusiasm that EGU members have for sharing our subject with many different public audiences.

“Climate lab at one of the most climate-vulnerable areas of the planet will help the students and their parents to adapt to climate change.” says the project lead of ‘Crowdsourcing environmental data through school students in climate vulnerable regions’ Arindam Roy, researcher at Laboratory of atmospheric processes and their impacts (LAPI), École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The proposed initiative will crowdsource environmental data by working with school students in one of the most climate vulnerable regions in Eastern India, the Sundarbans delta. By empowering and educating local school students, the project will enable them to create their own maps of environmental change, that will also provide valuable crowdsourced information for climate researchers. “Thank you EGU,” says Roy, “I don’t want to stop here. I would love to scale this up. Let there be climate schools in every part of the world! “

The next funded project ‘X-Ray scan of Earth’s crust?’ proposes to make a day in the life of a marine geophysicist easier to understand by building a physical model to explain how underwater seismology is detected. Project leads Milena Marjanovic and Simon Besançon, researchers at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France, are looking forward to making this often hard to understand area of research more accessible to their selected audiences. “We will build a model that, in the most playful way, revives a day at sea of marine geophysicists X-raying the Earth’s oceanic crust.”

The final project ‘A geoscience investigative podcast’ being led by Vitor Rodrigues Barrote, Silvia Volante, Bryant Ware, Christopher Spencer and members of the Geology Podcast Network, will tap into the current trend for audio journalism using podcasts by creating a geoscience podcast in an investigative format! “The Geology Podcast Network is thrilled to receive the support from EGU, the project is ambitious and the support from this grant will ensure its realization.” said project lead Vitor Rodrigues Barrote, “Geoscientist is an investigative podcast that will try to create an engaging narrative in order to familiarize the public with the evolution, importance and state-of-the-art of relevant questions in geoscience. In its first season, the host will present their discoveries to the audience as they attempt to answer the question ‘How old is the Earth?’. The aim is to disseminate science in a accessible/easily understandable style while captivating the audience through the thrill of solving a mystery. We invite geoscientists who are amateur actors to contact us if they wish to be involved in this exciting project!”

The grants are for a period of approximately 12 months and will be awarded this month. The winners will be invited to present their public-engagement work at next year’s EGU General Assembly and to participate in EGU educational and outreach activities in Vienna in 2023. They are also invited to submit a paper about their work to the journal Geoscience Communication.

Images in header by Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Vitor Barrote and Jianlin Liao.

• More information about EGU Public Engagement Grants