- 1Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 2Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany
- 3Geoscience Center, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
- 4Department of Geosciences, Tübingen University, Tübingen, Germany
- 5Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany
- 6Faculty of Geosciences, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
- 7MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
- 8Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, IPSL, CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
- 9Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
- 10Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Department of Environmental Science, Informatics and Statistics, Venice-Mestre, Italy
- 11Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, INRAE, IRD, Grenoble INP, IGE, Grenoble, France
A new deep ice-core record from the East Antarctic Plateau reaching at least 1.2 million years is now available through the Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Core project (BEOIC). This record spans the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), when glacial-cycle pacing shifted from ~40 kyr to ~100 kyr, and therefore offers key constraints when combined water-isotope and greenhouse-gas measurements are interpreted together.
Recovering an accurate water-isotope signal from the deepest and oldest ice is challenging because diffusion in solid ice attenuates high-frequency variability. High-precision, high-resolution measurements combined with physically based estimates of isotope diffusion can be used to quantify signal attenuation and assess the feasibility of signal deconvolution.
Here, we present a combined modelling and data study that quantifies diffusion-driven attenuation of the water isotope signal along the BEOIC using updated age–depth information and borehole temperature constraints. We apply the resulting transfer functions to high-resolution isotope sections from multiple depths to evaluate the recoverable bandwidth and to test spectral/Wiener restoration approaches, including the impact of measurement noise and sampling resolution on the reconstruction.
How to cite: Juelsholt, C., Vinther, B. M., Hörhold, M., Behrens, M., Wilhelms, F., Freitag, J., Weikusat, I., Jansen, D., Laepple, T., Minster, B., Landais, A., Steen-Larsen, H. C., Phumchat, N., Stenni, B., Salvini, M., Barbante, C., Parrenin, F., Samin, E., Scoto, F., and Gkinis, V.: Assessing the issue of the water isotope signal loss in the BEOIC ice core. A model and high-resolution data perspective., EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-9284, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-9284, 2026.