My City: Seoul

Seoul is the capital of South Korea. It’s a bustling city of 10.5 million people. The city is expanding all the time, and there are some incredible new buildings, such as the GT Tower East. The architects built it entirely of glass, with curving lines so it imitates the sea.

New buildings are everywhere in Seoul, but we have preserved the old city, too. In Bukchon village, there are still many old-style houses made of wood and stone. It’s a lovely place to spend an afternoon.

The Gangnam district is in the center of the city. It’s now famous for the 2012 hit song Gangnam Style by the singer Psy. He wrote the song because people in my neighborhood try to be very fashionable, and in the song, he’s laughing at us because we think we’re cool. We don’t mind. It’s great that people all around the world are talking about us!

My neighborhood is also a great place to spend your free time. Seoul is home to some excellent restaurants. On weekends, I like to go out and share a plate of bibimbap with my friends. It’s a popular rice dish topped with vegetables and a spicy sauce, and sometimes beef or an egg. Be careful if you try it because, like a lot of Korean food, it’s very spicy!

As the home of Samsung and LG, Korea is one of the world’s leading technological countries. And Seoul is known for being a very modern, futuristic place. For example, it’s possible to use a smartphone to pay for tickets on the subway. That is the best way to get around the city, and trains run from 5:30 a.m. until midnight.

It’s also possible to use a smartphone to pay for groceries at the supermarket or to turn appliances on and off in your home. This is possible because Wi-Fi connection speeds are incredibly fast all over the city. This isn’t science-fiction – it’s everyday life in my city, Seoul!

Global warming

The world’s oceans have warmed 50 percent faster over the last 40 years than previously thought due to climate change, Australian and US climate researchers reported Wednesday. Higher ocean temperatures expand the volume of water, contributing to a rise in sea levels that is submerging small island nations and threatening to wreak havoc in low-lying, denselypopulated delta regions around the globe.

The study, published ....................... the British journal Nature,adds ....................... a growing scientific chorus of warnings ....................... the pace and consequences rising oceans. It also serves as a corrective to a massive report issued last year ....................... the Nobel-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to the authors.

Rising sea levels are driven by two things: the thermal expansion of sea water, and additional water from melting sources of ice. Both processes are caused by global warming. The ice sheet that sits atop Greenland, for example, contains enough water to raise world ocean levels by seven metres (23 feet), which would bury sea-level cities from Dhaka to Shanghai.

Trying to figure out how much each of these factors contributes to rising sea levels is critically important to understanding climate change, and forecasting future temperature rises, scientists say. But up to now, there has been a perplexing gap between the projections of computer-based climate models, and the observations of scientists gathering data from the oceans.

The new study, led by Catia Domingues of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, is the first to reconcile the models with observed data. Using new techniques to assess ocean temperatures to a depth of 700 metres (2,300 feet) from 1961 to 2003, it shows that thermal warming contributed to a 0.53 millimetre-per-year rise in sea levels rather than the 0.32 mm rise reported by the IPCC.