From the editors.

The earth has been shifting in our hemisphere lately, in a variety of interesting and sometimes surprising ways. There's Marco Cisternas, a Chilean seismologist who has developed a fascinating theory of earhquakes. Louis Werner explains how Cisternas and everal colleagues studied samples plucked from buried soil and sand in areas hardest hit by Chilean tremors. Because Cisternas's homeland is one of the world's most seismically active areas, he and his group had many quakes to choose from. What they discovered is a relationship between major seismic events--events that were separated by hundreds of years. Their groundbreaking work might help scientists worldwide predict the strength and frequency of future tremors.

And the earth has been shaken politically in Chile, as well as the region, with the election of Michelle Bachelet as that country's first woman president--and the hemisphere's first head of state not to follow her husband to the office. President-elect Bachelet is already a member of the OAS inter-American family, as Paul Newell points...