an unprecedentedly strong Arctic extratropical cyclone in the 10 day range.
That would set things in motion again but how? There's been minimal correlation between depicted near-surface GFS winds and ice feature displacements for the last couple of months. It would be feasible to morph Ascat images ten days out but better guidance is needed. (Actually it would work better to reconstruct the effective force of winds retrospectively: from observed ice movement.)
The movies below, which are too tall to display here synchronized at 676x1128 pixels, show a hiatus of about a week in mid-January but with some resumption of motion in the Beaufort's CAA floe stringer and Kara export tongue. The indexed color table, ICA2, is fairly effective at distinguishing MYI from FYI and so makes feature tracking easier.
The interest in the former is thick multi-year ice moving into a zone where it will melt for certain in early summer and in the latter for Fram export which may be dominated by ice formed in the Kara in late October 2017. (A refinement of FYI is needed ... perhaps age in months.)
As wind-driven ice flows past Ushakov Island (Остров Ушакова), too tall at 294 m for ice to flow over, a gap in the ice is formed on the downwind (lee) side. The ice soon seals up though as pressure eddies from the sides are unopposed.
On ASCAT scatterometer images, this results in a rough surface which images as white streamers. These are recognizable but not as noticeable on much higher resolution Sentinel-1AB imagery (next post).
Vize Island (Остров Визе), 140 km to the south, has the same effect though it is too small to show up as a standalone feature most days and considerably narrower projected across the direction of ice movement. Its highest point is 22 m and lacks an ice cap.
Together, the two streamers conveniently track the flow of the ice until all the Kara ice is exported (or melts out). Both islands had/have substantial research stations and over-wintering staff so possibly some dramatic footage can be located of ice piling up on the upwind (stoss) side.
This effect is not new nor is it restricted to ice flow (see wipneus' earlier Jan Mayen air flow images). It was very likely the basis for the island's prediction in 1924:
In 1924, oceanographer Vladimir Wiese studied the drift of Georgy Brusilov's ill-fated Russian ship Svyataya Anna when she was trapped on the pack ice of the Kara Sea. Vize detected an odd deviation of the path of the ship's drift caused by certain variations of the patterns of sea and ice currents. He deemed that the deviation was caused by the presence of an undiscovered island whose coordinates he was able to calculate with precision thanks to the availability of the successive positions of the St. Anna during its drift. The data of the drift had been supplied by navigator Valerian Albanov, one of the only two survivors of the St. Anna.
Finally, the island was discovered on 13 August 1930 by a Soviet expedition led by Otto Schmidt aboard the Icebreaker Sedov under Captain Vladimir Voronin. The island was named after Professor Vize of the Soviet Arctic Institute who was at the time aboard the Sedov and who was able to set foot on the island whose existence he had predicted. wiki