ABSTRACT
Communicating science is difficult because of the process, which, as we all know, is iterative by nature. It is a jigsaw puzzle, and each discovery is simply another piece that gradually reveals part of the larger picture. However, in a crisis, this key element—the hindsight and self-correcting course afforded by the passage of years, decades, and centuries—does not exist. During Deepwater Horizon, scientists did not recognize that the media’s mission to provide immediate, definitive information about unfolding events to an anxious public limited their ability to be comprehensive. How can scientists effectively communicate when the puzzle they are working on has only a few interconnected pieces?
