Welcoming Address for the 30th Anniversary of the Korean Society of Oceanography

Distinguished guest and participants, ladies and gentleman! It is a great honor and pleasure for me to have this opportunity of behalf of the Ocenographic Society of Korea commemorating its 30th Anniversary. As the chairman of Organizing Committee for this International Ocean Science Symposium, I would like to extend my sincerer welcome to all of you for being with us here today. The Korean seas are very interesting and unique in oceanographic sense. The East, Yellow and East China Seas form the western marginal seats of the Northwest Pacific. The Korean seas are along the pathway for the mineral dust and air pollutants transported from Asia to the central North Pacific. The Yellow and East China Seas and East Sea are completely different in their oceanographic characteristics. The Yellow and East China Seas are a broad continental shelf with depths less than 200 m. Its hydrography is strongly influenced by vast amounts of freshwater discharge form the Changjiang and Huang Ho. The circulation of the seas are to be influenced by the tides, and prevailing northerly winter monsoon wind, river discharge in wet summer monsoon, and the intrusion of the Kuroshio. The sediment inputs from the two large rivers are equivalent to the world largest Ganges Bramaputra Rivers in puts. The Yellow and East China Seas are stratified in summer and well mixed in water which dictates a large phytoplankton bloom in spring. The East Sea is a semi-enclosed basin reaching more than 3,000 m deep. Overall circulation is locally driven by winds, thermal and freshwater forcing and by inflow at Korea Strait with outflow at Tsugaru and Soya Straits. Tides are weak in the East Sea. The East Sea experiences significant variation of Corilois parameter. A western boundary current, the East Korea Warm Current flows northward form Korea Strait a confluence with the southward-flowing North Korean Cold Current. Another branch of the inflow follows more nearly the shelf edge along Honshu. In subsurface flow, low salinity water of northern origin is seen to underthrust the East Korean Coastal Current and is found along the Korean coast nearly to Korea Strait. In the geological sense, the Korean seas are also unique. The Yellow Sea is a shallow, post-glacially submerged epiconinental sea bound on the east by a long stretch of ria-type coast. The Yellow Sea floor is rather flat and progressively deepens toward the southeast to form the Okinawa Trough. The Korean coast in the Yellow Sea is one of the muddy coasts in the world. The East Sea is characterized by a narrow shelf with a straight coastline. The East Sea deepens abruptly forming a number of deep basins between ridges and surrounding margins that are related to the rifting on a back-arc basin associated with the subduction of the Pacific Plate. This interesting and unique features of the Korean seas have begun to unravel in the second half of the 20th century. Our research capability has been initiated in 1966 by formation of Korean Oceanographic Society, and started formal college education in 1968, and establishing ocean research institute in 1973, and later strengthen by launching ocean-going research vessels in 1992. International cooperation focused on the Korean seas are also increasing recently.