The papers in this volume illustrate a number of approaches that are becoming increasingly common and offer the prospect of making significant advances in the broad related topics of the science, hazard, and policy issues of large continental intraplate earthquakes. Plate tectonics offers little direct insight into the earthquakes beyond the fact that they are consequences of slow deformation within plates and, hence, relatively rare. To alleviate these problems, we use space geodesy to define the slowly deforming interiors of plates away from their boundaries, quantify the associated deformation, and assess its possible causes. For eastern North America, by far...