The EGU26 conference was held in Vienna, Austria, from 3 to 9 May 2026. This year was of particular interest to the ice core community, as, in addition to the annual “Frontiers in Ice Core Sciences” session, there was also a special session entitled “Beyond EPICA: Old Ice and the MPT” (*). This exceptional session, held right at the start of the conference, revealed data from the Beyond EPICA deep ice core, produced by the various European laboratories collaborating on the project.
Part of the LSCE’s GLACIO team travelled to the event to present the team’s results during the oral presentations and poster sessions. The conference opened with oral presentations by Anna Maria Klüssendorf and Louisa Brückner, who introduced the session “Beyond EPICA: old ice and the MPT”, which attracted a large proportion of the glaciology and palaeoclimatology community from all fields. They presented the results of orbital dating and the preservation of the signal in the ice core.
In the following poster session, Amaëlle Landais presented the results of surface densification at Little Dome C, obtained in collaboration with Claire-Mathilde Stucki (IGE), Emma Samin presented water isotope data from the surface of Little Dome C and from deep ice at Beyond EPICA (MIS 5, and MIS 23–31), and Léa Baubant presented the results of D17O in atmospheric O2 from the Beyond EPICA ice core during the MPT.
The following day, during the “Frontiers in ice core sciences” session, Emma Samin gave an oral presentation on the 17O-excess results from the EPICA ice core, for which measurements have been ongoing for around ten years at the LSCE. The GLACIO-show concluded with an oral presentation by Nicolas Bienville on the results of biological oxygen fractionation obtained using the new devices developed in the aquaoxy project, during the session “Stable isotope and novel tracers in atmospheric and biogeosciences”.
(*) MPT : Mid-Pleistocen Transition