The reason for the thinner ice east of Resolute is that it is younger. It has kept moving through most of the winter
http://go.nasa.gov/224OkJu. Not as fast as at the southern end of Nares strait but enough to form a polynia at times. I think most of the ice from Resolute to Baffin Bay originates from ice that formed on a polynia in the preceding months. At present ice at Resolute isn't moving but you can see the outline of an earlier opening in the warmer probably thinner ice. (please note that the image i linked to in my previous post was from 2015). Younger ice also has less snow on it which also allows its surface to be warmed more by the relatively warm ocean underneath.
seaicesailor: worldview does not work as well with Explorer as has been acknowledged by NASA. I use Firefox but Chrome is also ok. If less detail is needed for larger scale features the AMSR-2 89GHz channel is interesting because it is less susceptible to weather. It still shows day to day changes due to cloud and temperature changes but you can still see movement of recognizable features. Wipneus' animations are of course better, they use data from the same sensor but processed in combination with other channels to remove these temperature, cloud and precipitation effects (not entirely). I just like being able to choose the place I want to look at and move back and forth through the days at my own pace. Unfortunately the AMSR-2 images are only available from Jan. AMSRE images are there from 2002 to Sept 2011.
http://go.nasa.gov/224Scu9In either case IR or microwave I can't say how thick ice is in absolute terms. I take colder surfaces as an indication of thicker ice underneath (when air temperatures have been lower than water as they are now) all else being equal. I will keep watching and hope to learn more.
In the attached image notice the line of older floes (blues among green ) stretching to the west from the beaufort gyre.. Also the yellow along the western north coast of Alaska which is probably quite thin ice. Landfast ice is reported to be thinner than usual.