The "beaver force", a sort of off-shoot force from the deep Gulf Stream's energy, in action causing or helping to splinter MYI between the Fram Strait and North Pole:
I am not at all surprised that MYI breaks between the Fram Strait and North Pole. In this area there is an unaccounted force attacking sea ice from beneath. Back in 2007 the-then-editor of Weather magazine asked me to publish these and write an article but I never accomplished it. (So only the people attending the various conference where I have presented it have heard it.)
I first show the image of 'zebra ice' which is basically the back-n'-forth heaving of the Arctic Ocean which fights the riparian discharges falling from Siberia. On sea ice this causes an undulating sea ice surface contour when the winds scatter snow along the surface of sea ice. Snow then predominantly accumulates on the wave troughs (white stripes), with crests on ice left barren (green stripes). As a result, the sea ice appears to have zebra-like stripes that originate from the river estuary. The troughs are more saline and dense water, the crests are less dense fresh water. When snow is then blown across the ice, it accumulates on troughs above denser sea water.
Once these breakwater discharges or 'riparian waves' reach the continental slope they fall into deep ocean forming vertical eddies. These eddies then sink and warm up in deep current (the Gulf Stream) and bounce to the surface near the North Pole (just in the area behind the Fram Strait).
The vertical eddies are equivalents of cumulus clouds in sea water: the centre has a strong rising water, while their edges have a falling water stream (a down draft). Once rebounding eddies hit the sea ice on the surface, they break it, or bend it, from beneath. A 'spahghetti ice' forms: curved, bending sea ice features that are highly distinctive from sharp ice forms of the ice floes.
The expansionary energy is extracted from the thermal inertia of the Gulf Stream when the non-saline eddies venture into it from above, they then densify and warm further until at critical point somewhere above +4C start becoming less dense than the more saline Gulf Stream water. Then they suddenly rebound the surface causing ice leads to widen, the sea ice to form elevated domes like floating immense pancakes or more irregular spaghetti-like curved meanders in ice.
I am also showing how the breakwater conveyor stitches onto rotating MYI at the rear end of the Arctic Ocean - due to velocity differentials and divergent directions a series of parallel perpendicular drifts open along the Komsomoletski Island - Ellesmere Island 'barrier'. Of course, we no more have solid MYI disk at the rear or anywhere, so this bit is now purely historic (bygone) feature that the Arctic Ocean once had.
What these rebounding eddies mean is that there is a hammer beneath ice that is pushing sea ice up and breking it (or widening the leads in sea ice). I am calling this here as "beaver force" after the Clovis period North Americans who believed that there were beavers underneath the Foxe-Laurentide Ice Dome that lifted it up to cause sudden, unpredictable (Jokullhaup) floods.