Sandstorm blankets East Asia

Beijing residents use any means to pretect themselves from the swirling dust

SEOUL, South Korea -- Parts of South Korea have been covered by thick brownish yellow dust after a massive sandstorm swept in from China, where it had reduced visibility to less than 50 meters in some regions.

Airports cancelled flights, motorists experienced reduced visibility and downtown Seoul was cast in a dense sand-induced gloom on Thursday.

Meteorologists predicted the storm would lift on Friday but in the interim doctors warned residents to carry umbrellas and wash thoroughly when they returned home to prevent irritation.

The storm enveloped the Chinese capital Beijing on Wednesday, turning the normally polluted city sky from gray to orange.

Beijingers wore masks and fled to shelters as traffic ground to a virtual halt as gusty, dirty winds whipped around the city.

Worst in a decade

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Most of northern China felt the brunt of the huge storm -- the strongest and most intense this spring -- which began on Tuesday when winds picked up sand from the expanding desert regions in northwestern China and Inner Mongolia.

The state-run Xinhua news agency described the storm as the worst to hit China in a decade, reducing visibility to less than 50 meters in some areas of the Gansu and Ningxia provinces as well as the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

Sandstorms are frequent in spring, triggered by sudden seasonal temperature changes, and have troubled Beijingers for 10 years, mostly due to the rapidly approaching desert to the west of the capital.

The storms are so bad they risk clouding the Olympic Games due to be staged in the city in 2008.

In response, the Chinese government has pledged almost $7 billion to curb a worsening desertification problem.

Human role

Downtown Seoul on Thursday

A survey released in January found China's desert had grown by so much, it takes up almost 30 percent of the country's land mass -- or 2.7 million square kilometers.

The survey, based on 1999 figures, said that though global warming played some part, burgeoning populations were directly responsibly for turning 18.2 percent of China into desert.

As demonstrated by the current sandstorm affecting South Korea, the impact of land turning into desert is not restricted to China's borders alone.

Last year, a sprawling Asian dirt storm blew across the Pacific and sprinkled millions of tons of the Gobi and Takla Makan deserts as far east as Florida, causing one of the largest North American dust clouds ever recorded.

The eastward winds have long spurred protests from residents of Korea and Japan, who have faced similar, if milder, dust epidemics from China.