When quakes swarm: Are earthquakes contagious?

I’ve never been in an earthquake before, so I couldn’t tell you why I find them so appealing. It was especially intriguing when I came across this article because I can’t imagine being in an earthquake, let alone many in the span of 24 hours. The fact that “In one 24-hour period this week no less than seven major earthquakes have rocked a small area near Vanuatu and the Santa Cruz Islands” (O’Hanlon 1), is mind blowing. That is such a huge number! One must also consider that the first few get progressively more intense. I can’t imagine what the people who live in Vanuatu are experiencing.
I’m not really sure if I want to learn more about plate tectonics. In all honesty, it sounds kind of boring, except for the actual earthquake part. It’s weird. Whenever I hear about an earthquake, or even a tsunami triggered by an earthquake, I try to distance myself from that story (if it’s on TV, I’ll change channels. If it’s in the paper, I’ll flip sections). Now, of course, I always feel a little guilty doing that, but it really does weird me out a bit. I guess we’ve been lucky that we haven’t had to live through anything really substantial as far as natural disasters are concerned. Who knows, maybe later in the year we will learn about how earthquakes work, (actually, I know we are), and I could come around and find that I actually really like that kind of stuff. We’ll see how well I do on the earthquake lab. Ask me then.
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This is my response to the article I read by Larry O'Hanlon from MSNBC. I was unable to post the link or the article to this blog because I've gotten a flurry of error messages, keeping me from sharing it with you guys. If you're dying to read it, you can go to msnbc website. The title of this post is the title of the article.