You have a point about the story dredging in the OP. Here's a more carefully sourced story that has more context: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia

You have a point about the story dredging in the OP. Here's a more carefully sourced story that has more context: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14seismic.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14seismic.html?... I think the overall displacement (around 13 feet as quoted in the article above) is of interest to both specialists and to the lay public. Just as an indicator of size. The main thing that's of interest to earthquake people is not so much the peak displacement, as the underlying stress/strain field (i.e., the forces and displacements as a function of space). There will most certainly be a slew of journal publications, as well as press releases, once the displacement data are analyzed. Here's an example of the latter, for the Landers earthquake, which was a M7.2 in 1992 in the desert east of LA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giJaGdfavfs&feature=channel_video_title http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giJaGdfavfs&feature=chann... The closing frames show how the strain probably accumulated in the centuries prior to the earthquake. * It may be helpful to say: what they're driving at with all this hyper-precise GPS and displacement modeling is a forecast capability for earthquakes, same as is done for weather. In both cases you have sparse measurements of fields that are assimilated into a forward model.