Introduction to the Special Issue on the 2008 Wenchuan, China, Earthquake

International audienceThe Mw 7.9 Wenchuan earthquake occurred on 12 May2008 at 14:28 China standard time (06:28 UTC) in the middleof the day. People were caught by surprise because thisregion, along the edge of the Tibetan plateau, was not listedas a place with a high seismic hazard. Destruction was huge.More than four million inhabitants were left homeless.Casualties numbered more than 80,000 people, and therewere major economic losses. This event was one of the deadliestearthquakes in China during the last few centuries, afterthe Haiyuan earthquake in 1920 and the Tangshan earthquakein 1976, which claimed 200,000 and 250,000 lives,respectively. The Wenchuan earthquake occurred a fewmonths before the beginning of the 2008 Olympic games,held in Beijing, China, and the emergency response from thegovernment of the Republic of China was massive. In part,for efficiency during this tremendous rescue effort, scientistshad difficulty gaining access to the field for the first severalmonths. Such difficulties have partly hampered deploymentof temporary networks of survey equipment, such as GPS orseismic stations by international teams, as is often the caseafter a major earthquak