Abstract:

In the past 30 years, alarge-scale change occurred in the Arctic climatic system, which had never been observed before 1980s. At the same time, the Arctic sea ice experienced a special evolution with more and more rapidly dramatic declining. In this circumstance, the Arctic sea ice became a new focus of the Arctic research. The recent advancements about abrupt change of the Arctic sea ice are reviewed in this paper. The previous analyses have demonstrated the accelerated declining trend of Arctic sea ice extent in the past 30 years, based on in-situ and satellite-based observations of atmosphere, as well as the results of global and regional climate simulations. Especially in summer, the rate of decrease for the ice extents was above 10%  per decade. In present paper, the evolution characteristics of the arctic sea ice and its possible cause are discussed in three aspects, i. e. the sea ice physical properties, the interaction process of sea ice, ocean and atmosphere and its response and feed back mechanism to global and arctic climate system.  

Key words: Arctic, sea ice, abrupt change, climate