By Shane M Hanlon

Scicomm comes in many shapes and sizes, from the talk about your science to the local nature group, to communicating your science over Twitter, to drawing your science (e.g. our Sketch Your Science event at Fall Meeting). It’s also my job – my days are consumed with thinking about ways to better help fellow scientists share their research with any audience. So, imagine my surprise when it took about a week for it to click that one of AGU’s newest campaigns is really scicomm in disguise.

For many, emojis have become a part of everyday life. They act as signatures – smiley faces, frowns, you name it. Personally, I never really strayed far from those two, but there are hundreds, if not thousands out there. And, even though there are so many and such diversity, the sciences are not well represented. We’re out to change that.

AGU has been asked by the Unicode Technical Committee to provide a list of suggestions for science-related emojis and we’re taking suggestions from you! You can provide your suggestions here and check out our Storify of #geomoji tweets here.

We’ve been asked to propose some additional science emoji. What geoscience emoji do you want to see? Let us know #geomoji 🌎☄️⛈🌑 🌊 🌋

— Am Geophysical Union (@theAGU) January 6, 2017

When this campaign started, I thought that it was just a fun idea and a way to more realistically represent sciences in social media. But it’s more than that, it’s scicomm! Emojis might seem silly but they are a representations of people, things, places, animals, and…science! Want to see your science represented so that you can text your friends about your day? Let us know!

-Shane M Hanlon is an AGU Sharing Science Specialist