総合学術博物館主催・生態適応グローバルCOE共催　公開講演会

日時

2009年11月17日（火）　16：00～17：00

場所

東北大学理学部生物地学共通講義室

聴講料

無料　どなたでも聴講可能です

講師

洪在上（ホン・ジェサン）博士
東北大学総合学術博物館　客員教授　・　韓国　仁荷（インハ）大学　海洋生物学科　教授

演題

The Yellow Sea Tidal Flat: The World’s Largest Coastal Landscape in Peril
（黄海の干潟：危機に瀕する世界最大の沿岸域景観）

講演内容

洪在上教授は、韓国における底生生物研究の第一人者です。今回のご講演では、黄海における特殊な干潟環境の成り立ちと、そこに生息する様々な生物についてご紹介いたします。また、近年の環境悪化に伴う黄海沿岸域の危機についても詳しくご説明します。ご講演は、英語での発表となります。

講演要旨

The Yellow Sea Tidal Flat:The World’s Largest Coastal Landscape in Peril
Jae-Sang Hong
Department of Oceanography, Inha University

The Yellow Sea is a part of North Pacific Ocean. Latitudinally, it extends to approximately 41°N to the north and joins the East China Sea near 31°N to the south. It covers an area of about 457,000 km2. The sedimentary environment and history in the Yellow Sea and East China seas have been influenced primarily by the broad shallow nature of this epicontinental shelf and by the large influx of fluvial sediments from the adjacent Yellow River (Huanghe), Yangtze River (Changjiang), and other Korean rivers in the eastern Yellow Sea. The sediments of the Yellow Sea are mostly terrigenous, carried by rivers and winds from the surrounding Chinese and Korean lands. It receives annually more than 1.6 billion tons of sediments from China’s major rivers such as the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, both of which have formed large deltas, and a considerable amount of fine and coarse-grained sediments comes from the rivers of the Korean Peninsula as well.
The Yellow Sea tidal flat covers an area of about 20,316 km2, and when treated as one complex, it rates as the largest intertidal area in the world. The Yellow Sea tidal flat hosts a vast diversity of flora and fauna that are critical to biogeochemical cycles and that serve not only as an important source of food in this region but also provide with the unique coastal landscape. However, recent serious changes in the biological resources along with the wetlands losses are largely due to effects of human activities. The Yellow Sea tidal flat is faced with four main challenges; (1) sharp decrease of sediment discharge into the sea by damming and diking of major rivers, (2) rapid increase of pollution matter into the sea due to the population expansion in the coastal regions of the Yellow Sea, (3) habitat loss due to the coastal wetlands reclamation and shoreline modifications, (4) fisheries operations. Many of these environmental problems are of a transboundary nature in this region, so that multi-national action plans to control these challenges are needed as in the European Wadden Sea Trilateral Co-operation Program.