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The article presents a discussion of the scientific expeditions sponsored by the British Royal Society during the second half of the 20th-century. Details are given overviewing the general goals and initiatives followed by the Royal Society during the period, highlighting their diversity. Multiple examples are then given of individual international expeditions, describing their missions, accomplishments and academic reception by the Society upon their return. Expeditions discussed include a geophysics study in Antarctica, a biological tour in Chile, and tropical forest exploration in the Solomon Islands.

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.