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The article discusses four reports within the issue regarding geophysics research, including one by Sato and colleagues, Simons and colleagues, Ide and colleagues, and Vigny and colleagues. The teams illustrate the use of a network of global positioning system (GPS) detectors to show how the Earth's surface deformed before and after the Tohoku-Oki magnitude 9 (M9) earthquake in Japan on March 11, 2011 and the M9 earthquake in central Chile (Maule) on February 27, 2010, in which thousands of lives were saved as a result of early warning systems for tsunamis.

The article discusses a report by seismologist Harmony Colella of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and colleagues attending the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union from December 3-7, 2012 in San Francisco, California, on a fault behavior model. Colella and colleagues used computer simulations to show how slow slip events transfer stress in a fault, noting that the model behaved the way the fault off Japan did prior to the March 2011 earthquake.

The article discusses three separate online reports published in "Science" regarding seismology research analyzing the March 11, 2011 magnitude-9.0 earthquake in Sendai, Japan. Topics include results from the reports which gauged where and by how much the fault slipped, the pattern of the slip, and concern by seismologists about the southern portion of the fault, which broke in the Tohoku earthquake.