Every year numerous tourists and local meet at the southern end of the Korean Peninsula to participate in the Festival of the separation of the Jindo Sea and witness the “miracle” where the sea separates, exposing a path of about 3 kilometers that connects the Jindo and mode islands.
This event, which is repeated twice a year, celebrates a natural phenomenon. The Jindo Sea, which is the northern part of the Eastern China Sea, goes back so much that it reveals a land bridge 2.9 kilometers long and 40-60 meters wide that connects the island of Jindo with the nearby island, as explained by the media .
The phenomenon jumped into international attention in 1975 when Pierre Landy, French ambassador accredited in South Korea, compared the event with the Red Sea miracle described in the Bible and called it “The Korean miracle of Moses” in a French newspaper.
This show, however, is not a religious miracle, but has a scientific explanation. Most people know that the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon causes the sea level to rise and fall periodically, causing tides. But, as Kevan Moffet, attached professor at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Texas, there are more factors that promote the spectacular setback from the Jindo Sea.
Certain factors, such as the rotation of the earth or the change in the distance between the moon and the earth, are repeated regularly and together they form tides. These different “gravitational forces” combine to create different but repetitive patterns.
“The phenomenon consists of many factors, all of them contributing to the tides at different rhythms and at different times,” Moffett wrote to the same medium. Sometimes, these effects “gradually add”, which means that they reinforce each other and create particularly high or low water levels, as is the case of Jindo. “It is as if several drummers play uninconfined but sometimes they gave a strong note at the same time,” he added.
At that time, in the sea of Jindo, the water is not “divided” literally, but that the entire level of the water goes back so much that a prominent part of the seabed emerges. “The reason why the terrain is rising there is probably because the sediments have accumulated more where the water moves less, that is, along the line that runs between jind and mode,” Moffett explained.
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