Hello, Here is Korea!
These days, I'm taking a World Geography class at school.
This week, we learned about global landforms and the processes that shape them.
In this unit, I learned about karst topography, but we didn’t cover marine karst landscapes in detail. That’s why I became especially interested in Vietnam’s unique karst landforms in Ha Long Bay.
In Korea, here are no fully developed tower karst formations.
Because Korea has a temperate climate, it receives less rainfall compared to Vietnam’s tropical climate, resulting in weaker chemical weathering and erosion.
That’s reason we can’t find tower karst formations in Korean landscapes.
However, I’ve learned that Ha Long Bay in Vietnam is a well-known example of a tower karst landscape. What makes it even more fascinating is that it’s a rare marine karst formation and has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its unique geological value! This sparked my curiosity and led me to write this question.
According to what I’ve learned, after the Ice Age, rising sea levels or land subsidence often caused landforms to be submerged by seawater, forming rias coastlines or fjords. So, my understanding is that tower karst formations first developed in Ha Long Bay, and later, due to rising sea levels, the area became flooded with seawater, forming a marine karst landscape.
But now I’m wondering — why did this process occur specifically in Vietnam?
Could it be because Vietnam is a humid region with abundant rainfall, and at the same time, the area experienced sea level rise that allowed seawater to flood the karst terrain? In Korea, cases where land was submerged to that extent due to sea level rise are relatively rare.
So I’m curious — what conditions did Vietnam meet that made it more prone to submersion, resulting in the formation of such an incredible marine karst landscape? Thank you for reading my writing.
🌸 Let me introduce our current weather!
These days, the weather in Korea is transitioning into spring. At my school, there are many cherry blossom trees around the playground, and as the weather has recently gotten warmer, the blossoms are starting to bloom. Usually, temperatures begin to rise above freezing in March, but this year, it even snowed in March. I think these kinds of unusual climate changes are happening all around the world in some way. That’s why I believe governments need to take action through policies to reduce the use of fossil fuels such as carbon.
My family uses an eco-friendly electric vehicle, and it feels rewarding to know that even small actions like this can help the environment. In fact, since electric cars are not yet fully widespread, the government currently offers various incentives for their use. This is because the government aims to expand the use of renewable energy.
Both Vietnam and Korea share this goal of expanding renewable energy. Korea has set a target of generating 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Vietnam aims to generate more than half of its electricity from renewable sources by the same year. According to my brief research, Vietnam’s current renewable energy ratio is about 3% higher than Korea’s.
Considering Vietnam has a tropical climate over much of its territory, it’s likely that its high solar irradiance has helped raise the proportion of solar energy. However, I think there must be other contributing factors as well. A 3% difference in total electricity generation is a significant figure!
In Korea, there’s a legal regulation that requires public buildings with a total floor area of over 1,000 square meters to supply a certain portion of their expected energy consumption using renewable energy. As far as I know, Vietnam doesn’t have a law requiring buildings to use renewable energy sources. So I’m curious how they managed to reach a 13% renewable energy share.
It’s truly impressive that Vietnam ranks among the world’s top 10 in terms of total solar power capacity. I also heard that eco-friendly electric motorcycles have been widely distributed thanks to the government’s efforts—could that have had an influence? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how Vietnam achieved this 13% renewable energy share.
(This isn't a photo of my school, but it’s a recent picture of Seoul, the capital of Korea! Aren’t the cherry blossoms around Lotte Tower beautiful?)
