Korea Shivers in Fresh Cold Spell

Published on 2018/01/13 | Source

Southern Korea saw heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures on Thursday, with the southwestern city of Gwangju covered in 14.4 cm of snow.

This caused flight cancellations and traffic accidents in many parts of the region while visitors were stranded on Jeju Island as flights and ferries were grounded.

Flights were grounded from around 8:30 a.m. at Jeju Internatonal Airport after snow piled up on runways overnight followed by heavy winds, requiring emergency clean-up efforts that lasted more than two hours. They resumed at midday, but snow piled up again causing runways to be closed for an hour at 6:30 p.m.

Chaos ensued after around 5,000 passenger converged at the airport.

The Korea Meteorological Administration forecast temperatures would drop even further on Friday to hover between -23 to -6 degrees Celsius, way lower than normal.

On Friday morning the mercury plunged to -17 degrees in Seoul, -14 degrees in Incheon and -9 degrees in Busan.

The cold spell is expected to last until Saturday.