Tweets

Twitter is essential for a journalist.

So says a Scientific American blog post that explains how Twitter is a vast source of live updates written by all kinds of people in the middle of all kinds of situations (read “news stories”). This means Twitter is effectively an early notification system for a news story.

I headed over to my twitter account.

I’m not a big social media user, yet somehow I’ve amassed over 1100 accounts to follow. Result: my feed is full of rubbish so I don’t check in.

The blog post suggests that following rubbish means I’m following the wrong people.

Action: I dropped over a thousand of them.

New result: I have a feed plagued with suggestions on who to follow (*growl*).

The unfollow exercise wasn’t a complete waste of effort. I spent some time looking through the people I do follow, and amongst the coal I found a diamond tweet from Carolina Camargo. To quote her profile, Carolina is an oceanographer at NIOZ (The Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research) who’s trying to unpuzzle the sea-level change budget.

Sea level

Carolina describes the sea level budget as comprising the sum of all contributors to mean sea level. The puzzle, she explains, is that when you add up these individual contributions there’s an inexplicable 14% of observed global mean sea level that’s not accounted for.

This equates to a little over a centimeter of sea level rise over the last 25 years – enough seawater to fill around 1.6 billion Olympic sized swimming pools. And it’s not known where all of this water is coming from.

Plain language

Carolina’s tweet points to her work in putting the pieces together to solve the puzzle of sea level rise. It caught my eye because she’s made a video that introduces her paper in simple and plain language. It’s a brilliant idea! (And video!)

I clicked through and read the abstract of her paper on “Exploring Sources of Uncertainty in Steric Sea-Level Change Estimates”. Interesting stuff!

I was also interested to see that underneath the abstract there’s a “Plain Language Summary”. Another great idea to make a scientific message accessible to the community outside academia. This time, by the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.

Lessons learned

So, my revisited experience with twitter: I didn’t find a news piece (the paper was published in September 2020), but I did learn that scientists and academic journals are aware of the need for clear communication with the wider community.

Perhaps “aware” is too weak a word; Carolina and her colleagues at the NIOZ Sea Level Centre have profile pages which explain their work in plain language. Certainly in their case, I’m very encouraged with their eagerness to share their work.

This bodes well for reaching out to them in the future for something to write about!

Paul

Follow Carolina’s tweets here.

(You can find me on Twitter too – but I’m not yet very active! 😉 @OceanSciPs)