ice movement can be affected by wind and congestion in addition to currents. The return half circle if it exists has more ice and the ice is thicker and more congested
That's correct. The ice is largely driven by surface winds acting via aerodynamic drag on ice roughness, notably pressure ridges and freeboard edges. That goes as the square or even cube of wind speed. Current acts by hydrodynamic drag on keels but these are soon ablated.
Since wind speeds on synoptic scale cyclonic air masses are much higher on the rotating periphery, we see the fastest ice motion there on satellite time series and buoys (eg TPD, Beaufort Arm, Ellesmere to Banks, Lincoln Sea to Fram). The ice is largely stagnant in the interior CAB and, somewhat mysteriously, in the ESS and Laptev inside the islands.
As you say, conservation of mass would cause a huge pile-up as this faster ice slowed, just like on a freeway, not observed. A sharp boundary arc between stagnant ice and returning gyre would be visible, again observable but not observed. Since the pivotal year 2007, so much open water develops in the southern Chukchi and Beaufort that floes can't make it around, along the lines of Big Block a couple years back.
Arctic oceanography -- water properties at depth -- has been very difficult to conduct because of inhospitable access and seasonally thick ice cover. About all they can get from satellites is altimetry (higher sea level over fresher less dense water bodies). Moorings have been placed but at a density of 1-2 per million sq km; there are 3 in the Beaufort. These do not have sonar modems and must be retrieved annually by ship for download.
The US currently has zero icebreaker capability; Norway stepped in this year and was just barely able to recover data from the SIO 1-3 moorings, one of which surfaced under the ice cover and had to be located by a diver and the ice overhead cut out from above.
https://www.nersc.no/news/all-moorings-beaufort-sea-rescued-under-extreme-conditionsi don't follow buoy thread very closely
Buoys have proven to be a real can of worms yet they're about all that's out there year-round. They have constant issues with malfunction: damage from ice movement and bears, inexplicable reporting excursions, drift out of the ROI, melting out, bottom dragging of cables and battery failure. IABP does archive their data in nrt but seemingly lacks any budget for curation or annotation.
What you are seeing here from Uniquorn (and SimonF92) is highly original work that is gradually mainstreaming decades of display neglect and lack of data integration. Again, this reflects institutional siloing and journal insistence on print, ie refusal to display time series other than postage stamp .mov (in separated supplemental, not peer reviewed).
There can be legitimate scientific questions with satellite time series, person A seeing such-and-such but person B seeing au contraire. Most of this can be resolved with arrow and color overlays so both are looking at the same thing. This type of editing is far easier done in avi than mp4.
Vox posted the new MIT study of Arctic Ocean eddies on a different forum two weeks ago; the animation of 2011-14 water circulation at two depths is really worth viewing. The authors find no water gyre in the top 50 meters because of frictional suppression by stratification and the ice bottom. At moderate depths, mesoscale clockwise water circulation is observed.
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,596.msg295858.html#msg295858 http://www.mit.edu/~mgl/pdf/meneghello2019baroclinic.pdf open access