Ice cores are a key archive to study past climate variability. Various physico-chemical proxies provide key insights into past temperature, atmospheric composition, volcanic activity, and atmospheric circulation. Despite the large body of empirical information available, we still lack a detailed, process-based understanding of the creation of the archived climatic signal. This session aims, in light of the new "Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice" (BE-OI) ice-core project, at an in-depth discussion on the extent to which climatic signals are archived in the proxy signals, how the archival processes – from the atmosphere to the surface to post-depositional changes in the firn and ice and even further smoothing/diffusion in the lower most part of the ice column – themselves affect the recorded signal, and how to optimally recover the original signals from existing ice-core records. We welcome contributions that shed light on this chain of processes, including interpretation of various proxies from new, or existing, ice core records from Antarctica, Greenland or high mountainous areas; analyses of climate model, reanalysis and back trajectory data; novel application of statistical and spectral methods to proxy data; or new measurement techniques. Finally, we encourage discussion about the impact the individual processes have on the relationship between proxy and past climate variability across various temporal and spatial scales.