Stories are an essential part of our everyday life, vehicles to understand how the world around us works, both physically and emotionally. They allow us to organise otherwise random facts and events into a cohesive and logical structure, making them easier to understand and remember. Science itself is also full of facts and processes, often seemingly disconnected but that, when put in context, pave the road for scientific discoveries. We propose that classical story-telling strategies can also be used to communicate science to a variety of audiences, specialist and non-specialist alike, and present a few practical examples of how this can be achieved. We focus on what we call the “story circle” narrative structure (see Fig. 1), a distillation of the “Hero’s Journey”(Campbell, 1949; Harmon, 2009). In this storytelling framework, the circle begins with a hero who, posed with a question, chooses to venture beyond their familiar space in a quest for answers. When the hero returns to familiar territory, they have been forever changed by their journey. Firstly, we discuss how this story circle can be directly mapped onto the structure of a research paper, enabling researchers to write up their work in a way that makes it easier to follow for the reader. Then we apply the story circle strategy to a real research example aimed at explaining large-scale mantle convection, in a story where silica is the “hero” who descends into the deep in a subducting slab to then rise back up to the surface in an upwelling plume. This approach to communicating science by exploiting its story-like qualities is key when explaining complex deep Earth processes to the non-academic public who, understandably, can struggle to grasp these concepts due to their abstract nature and detachment from everyday life. Ultimately, the scientific process is an expression of the most fundamental story of humanity – researchers look at the world as it is, see questions that need answering and go on a voyage of discovery to find the answers. When they return, the world has changed because of what was found on that journey. And so the cycle repeats, the circle keeps turning, and the ideas keep changing after every iteration. In science, however, we will never truly write “The End”.

The Hawaiian Island chain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a well-studied example of hotspot volcanism caused by an underlying upwelling mantle plume. However, the thermal and compositional nature of the plume is still uncertain. The depth and amplitude of seismic discontinuities can show how the plume effects phase transitions in mantle minerals, providing insights into the plume’s thermo-chemical properties. This study utilises >5000 high quality receiver functions from Hawaiian island stations to detect P-to-s converted phases. These receiver functions are stacked in a variety of ways in order to image seismic discontinuities between 200 to 800 km depth. In the mantle transition zone, we find that to the southwest of the Big Island the 660 discontinuity is split. This is inferred to represent the position of the hot plume at depth, with the upper discontinuity caused by an olivine phase transition and the lower by a garnet phase transition. In the upper mantle, the so-called X-discontinuity, which has an enigmatic origin, is found across the region at depths varying between 290 to 350 km. To the east of the Big Island the X-discontinuity lies around 336 km and is particularly strong in amplitude, to such an extent that the discontinuity around 410 km disappears. Synthetic modelling reveals that such observations can be explained by a silica phase transition from coesite to stishovite. This suggests there is widespread ponding of silica-saturated material (such as eclogite, which is silica-rich relative to pyrolite) spreading out from the plume to the east, a hypothesis which is consistent with dynamical models. We suggest that this seemingly thermochemical plume could be sampling recycled basalt, now in the form of eclogite, from lower in the mantle. Therefore these results support the presence of a significant garnet and eclogite component within the Hawaiian mantle plume. We will briefly highlight further work comparing Hawaii with other hotspot locations around the world to consider whether this is also occurring in other plumes and what heterogeneous plumes may imply about the recycling of material in the mantle.

We present our work as science communication duo Geologise Theatre – two graduate geoscience researchers who use theatrical techniques and music to communicate scientific concepts to a range of audiences. Through our performances we explore the concept of the “science musical” – a show whose main aim is to educate about science but strays from the bounds of a regular lecture or lesson by incorporating dramatic techniques, including character and narrative, as well as music. Between 2017 and 2019 we developed and performed the hour-long science musical “What Killed the Dinosaurs?”, aimed at children (age 7+) and their families. We play science detectives with a habit of breaking into song, who must investigate the hypotheses for the cause of the dinosaur extinction. We are helped out along the way by our new recruits - the audience. We did three sets of performances, each time re-writing and adapting the show in response to audience feedback and evaluation. Here we present our process in developing this work. We explore the idea of agency - good drama requires characters to act on wants and desires that we can understand and connect to on an emotional, human level. So how can we dramatise inanimate scientific processes? Or stories set in the geological past before humans were around? We try to access these concepts using a whole host of characters, from a sing-off between a mammal and dinosaur competing to survive, to a father and son duetting about their discovery of a global iridium anomaly. We also present a qualitative assessment of the efficacy of a science musical as a method of science communication. While writing about science within the constraints of a song or storyline can present compromises between accessibility and accuracy, we find that narrative structures help to convey the ups and downs of the scientific process. Songs and music play an important role in summarising key ideas and making them memorable. We qualitatively assessed the children’s understanding through drawings and found that most came away having grasped the key concepts. In our science musicals, the burden of conveying information takes precedence over the core drivers of a solely theatrical work, but we can draw on the techniques that theatre and musicals offer in order to introduce emotional connection with the audience and better convey a complex scientific message.