A Tale of Two Earthquakes

摘要

Thousands of lives were saved by the "Large Tsunami Warning" announcements of the Japan Meteorological Agency that followed the Tohoku-Oki earthquake of 11 March 2011. A similar alert followed the Central Chile (Maule) earthquake on 27 February 2010. Understanding better how such earthquakes develop might provide even more effective early-warning systems to help mitigate their devastating power. Four papers in this issue-by Sato et al. on page 1395 (7), Simons et al. on page 1421 (2), Ide et al. on page 1426 (3), and Vigny et al. on page 1417 (4)-report on both of these magnitude 9 (A/9) earthquakes, illustrating the use of networks of Global Positioning System (GPS) detectors to reveal how the Earth's surface deformed during and after the events.