West of Seoul, on the muddy beaches of Inchon where American troops splashed ashore 58 years ago to fight in the Korean War, a new steel-and-glass town is rising to attract foreign visitors, including medical tourists.
But on the bright side, the country's muddy beaches have deterred the kind of development seen elsewhere in the region.
Its warm water and grassy, muddy beaches were full of crabs, shrimp, sand sharks, tube worms, sand dollars, rays, jellyfish, squid, dolphin, mullet, umbrella fish, sea anemones, oysters, sea turtles and hundreds of species of birds my favorite being the sandpiper.
Tracking avian flu sometimes comes down to moves that have a lot of slapstick potential, like sprinting down a muddy Mongolian beach trying to tackle a scared but temporarily flightless swan.
We concurrently investigated changes in the spatial distribution of muddy-sand beach macrobenthic communities between two periods of contrasting anthropogenic impacts and examined year-to-year trends of wintering shorebirds.
Fundy's vast, muddy stretches of beach mean that even high tide makes for poor swimming.
It favors habitats with sandy or muddy bottoms, including beaches, estuaries, and bays, and can also be found over seagrass as well as on and around rocky and coral reefs.
Just down from the lawn, the enlarged beach was muddy and raw, and filled with so much debris that I put off looking at it until later.
