What is the appropriate scientific response to a human tragedy? Thorne Lay of the University of California, Santa Cruz asked himself and his colleagues that question in the days following the 26 December 2004 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Like the rest of us, he and other geophysicists saw disturbing images of thousands of bodies floating in the devastation from the tsunami. A flurry of e-mails and a New Year’s Eve conference call from Lay to his colleagues soon initiated a collective effort from the seismological community to analyze what happened. Their hope was to replace the usual race to publication among competing groups with a more concerted response: a single account that would provide a complete and robust characterization of the earthquake.
That account, now published in a collection of three papers in Science, 1–3 coauthored by 40 researchers from 23 universities and institutes in 7...
