KVIG Informative

A record that stood since 1904 fell this month in a single city. Nineteen people in South Korea did not survive the heat that broke it.

The southeastern city of Yangsan recorded 42.5 degrees Celsius, or 108.5 Fahrenheit, the highest temperature South Korea has logged since national weather observation began 122 years ago. South Korea’s Interior and Safety Ministry reported roughly 2,220 people diagnosed with heat-related illness since mid-May, with 19 confirmed deaths. The heat has killed more than 17,000 livestock and roughly 160,000 farmed fish. President Lee Jae Myung told his cabinet the country needs a fundamental overhaul of its national crisis system, calling the heat wave a national disaster and warning that this kind of extreme weather is becoming normal.

Seoul, home to more than 26 million people in its metropolitan area, received South Korea’s new severe heat wave warning, the country’s highest designation, issued when the perceived maximum temperature reaches at least 38 degrees Celsius. North Korea issued its own advisories, with state newspaper Rodong Sinmun urging farmers to protect crops and residents to avoid outdoor activity. Japan recorded at least eight deaths after torrential rain in Chiba prefecture, outside Tokyo, dumped three times the area’s normal August rainfall in half a day, triggering landslides, power outages and evacuation orders for more than 100,000 residents.

Climate scientists tie the pattern to El Niño, the naturally recurring Pacific Ocean phenomenon that weakens the trade winds normally pushing warm surface water toward Asia. Justin Sentian, an atmospheric science professor at Universiti Malaysia Sabah, explained that the weakened winds trap that warm water in the eastern Pacific instead of letting it fuel Asia’s summer monsoon systems the way it normally would. Human-caused climate change does not create El Niño, but scientists say it intensifies the heat and rainfall extremes the pattern already produces.

The health toll extends beyond the confirmed deaths. Fans collapsed at a South Korean baseball stadium during the peak heat. Lions died at a zoo. A North Korean doctor advised residents to eat dog meat to build stamina against the temperatures. In Fiji, a 26-year-old rugby player collapsed during a match linked to the broader Pacific heat pattern, illustrating that the exposure is not confined to Northeast Asia alone.

Japan’s flooding compounded an already difficult recovery from the earthquake that struck Kumamoto Prefecture earlier this summer, with disaster response crews now managing both flood damage and unfinished earthquake repairs in overlapping regions. Emergency agencies in both countries are operating two crisis responses simultaneously rather than one.

South Korea’s weather agency has not said when the pattern will break. The 122-year record that fell in Yangsan this month took more than a century to set. At the current pace of extreme weather in the region, it may not stand for another 122 years to be broken again.