River silt paints a whole sea golden-yellow
Between China and Korea, the Yellow Sea—also called the North Sea in some local usage—is a shallow Western Pacific margin tinted by golden silt from great rivers. Excluding the Bohai, it spans about 380,000 square kilometres yet averages only forty-four metres deep.
The Bohai Sea forms the innermost northwest bay, catching the Yellow, Hai, and Liao rivers; Korea Bay extends the northeast. Hydrographic limits and Korean naming traditions divide it from the Sea of Japan and East China Sea along lines past Jeju and the Yangtze mouth. North–south reach is about 960 kilometres, east–west about 700, with volume near 17,000 cubic kilometres and maximum depth around 152 metres—a drowned continental shelf left by post-glacial flooding.
Koreans officially call it the West Sea, alongside their East and South seas, and its many South Korean islands include Jejudo, Ganghwado, Baengnyeongdo and Jindo. Winters are cold and dry, with northerly monsoon winds from late November to March and January averages of −10 °C in the north, so drift ice and solid ice fields can block shipping there until spring. Summers are warm and wet, with typhoons from June to October, and a branch of the Kuroshio Current creeps north into the sea at under 0.8 km/h.
Tides rise twice a day, reaching only 0.9 to 3 m on the Chinese coast but 4 to 8 m along Korea. For about an hour, roughly twice a year in early May and mid-June, low water opens a 2.9 km path between Jindo and Modo islands, long celebrated locally in the Jindo Sea Parting Festival. A belt of intertidal mudflats about 10 km wide covers some 2,850 km² along Korea's west coast and surveys rank it the single most important site for migrating waders and shorebirds.
Summer blooms of blue-green algae add to the colour, and kelp is so abundant that China alone harvested 1.5 million tonnes of seaweed in 1979. About 200 fish species are caught commercially, from croakers to herring, and coastal populations reach about 250 people per km². Whaling has thinned the larger animals, but spotted seals, the only resident seal, have a sanctuary at Baengnyeongdo. Main ports include Dalian, Tianjin and Qingdao in China, Incheon in South Korea and Nampho in North Korea.
Source: Yellow Sea
