The Contribution to Earth Science Outreach from the Staff of Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Italy)

Science outreach is traditionally committed to individual scientists, who communicate to the public to promote awareness of science. Becoming increasingly important to bring science to a wide audience, the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, shortly after its foundation in 2001, has organized a team of part-time outreach scientists aimed at promoting science education, with particular emphasis to volcanic and seismic hazard. We present here an overview of the science outreach activities developed by our Institute, which have schools and public as their target groups. There are several venues of these activities: the headquarters of INGV in Rome and its many departments in Italy, from Milan to Catania. The Neapolitan region, with Vesuvius and the Phlegrean fields, and Sicily, with Stromboli, Vulcano, and Etna volcanoes, are the subject of several initiatives of scientific dissemination we organize, sometimes with the contribution of local authorities and Civil Defense, to explain how volcanoes work. Aim of these initiatives is to convey public understanding of the many-facet risks of Italian volcanoes, from paroxysmal eruptive activity to the menace of lava flows and ash fallout to infrastructures and inhabited areas, to landslides and tsunamis. Our activities also encompass a wide variety of formats, such as the opening of our labs to guided visits, contributing to national (e.g., the Italian “Week of the Scientific Culture”, launched by the Ministry of Education and Research) and international (e.g., the European “Night of the Researchers”) events, editing educational videos, creating multimedia tools also available on web. In museums and academies, and in concomitance of expositions and science festivals, we also organize exhibitions with experiments, models and exhibits designed to teaching and learning geophysics. Finally, we offer guided visits to the control rooms run by our institute, which ensures the round-the-clock volcanic and seismic surveillance of the whole Italian territory