Studied for over 250 years, the Jakobshavn Glacier has helped develop modern understanding of climate change and icecap glaciology.

[17] After 1997 the glacier began to accelerate and thin rapidly, reaching an average velocity of 34 metres (112 ft) per day in the terminus region.

Airborne altimetry and satellite imagery show that until early 2019, this temperature drop likely caused the glacier to re-advance, slow down, and thicken (by over 100 feet from 2016 to 2018).

[19][20][21] Large calving events where the glacier produces icebergs have also been found to trigger earthquakes due to ice-ice and ice-bottom of the fjord interactions.

Especially large calving events at Jakobshavn have produced glacial earthquakes that are detectable on seismographs worldwide with moment magnitudes in excess of 5.0.

This idea, proposed by Jay Zwally, was observed to be the cause of a brief seasonal acceleration of up to 20% on the Jakobshavns Glacier in 1998 and 1999 at Swiss Camp.

They offered a conclusion that the "coupling between surface melting and ice-sheet flow provides a mechanism for rapid, large-scale, dynamic responses of ice sheets to climate warming".

Examination of rapid supra-glacial lake drainage documented short term velocity changes due to such events, but they had little significance to the annual flow of the large outlet glaciers.

The reduced resistive force at the calving front is then propagated up glacier via longitudinal extension in what R. Thomas calls a backforce reduction.

[28] The cause of the thinning could be a combination of increased surface ablation and basal ablation as one report presents data that show a sudden increase in subsurface ocean temperature in 1997 along the entire west coast of Greenland, and suggests that the changes in Jakobshavn Glacier are due to the arrival of relatively warm water originating from the Irminger Sea near Iceland.

[30][31] There are theories that Greenland consists of three large islands under the ice sheet, separated at the coast by three narrow straits, one of them Jakobshavn Glacier.