Researching and publishing on geohazards can be hazardous to researchers and to others, leading to operational ethics concerns about balancing the need for geohazards research and the need for everyone’s safety. Potential ethical dangers of geohazards research are often known, identified and accepted, for instance through institutional risk assessment and research ethics processes. Not all possible ethical conundrums are necessarily fully accounted for, especially since the possibilities are physical and social. Identifying these operational ethical issues, in theory and in practice, is typically straightforward. Resolving the concerns tends to be more difficult. Science diplomacy within the context of disaster diplomacy research demonstrates how operational ethics for researching geohazards might be improved, at least in theory. Examples to consider are the usefulness of codes of conduct for improving ethical behaviour, the balance between risk reduction and risk management and the effectiveness of monitoring, enforcement and accountability mechanisms. In practice, geohazards researchers often diverge regarding their approaches to and interests in addressing operational ethics for geohazards research.