Etienne Legrain

Etienne Legrain serves as an unpaid employee in the Department of Water and Climate at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium. He leads the FWOTM1276 CAPSULE project (2025-2028), a fundamental research initiative modeling Antarctic Blue Ice areas to extract the oldest climatic reconstructions from ice cores.

His research centers on climate science with specialization in glaciology and paleoclimatology. Legrain investigates Antarctic blue ice formations to reconstruct historical climate patterns through ice core analysis, while extending his work to model glacial inception thresholds using positive degree-day methodologies. This integrates field observations with numerical simulations to understand long-term climate dynamics.

His 2025 publications reveal a dual focus: analyzing elevation-dependent warming absence in Antarctica through paleoclimate records, and establishing global thresholds for glacial inception. Both studies demonstrate interdisciplinary approaches combining geophysics, climate modeling, and ice core chronology to address critical questions in paleoclimatology and contemporary climate change.

Scientific awards: None documented in source material.

Legrain currently directs the FWOTM1276 CAPSULE project funded for fundamental research on Antarctic ice cores. No student advisees are mentioned, though his publications indicate extensive international collaboration across six institutional profiles. The research involves significant computational modeling and field data synthesis.

His work operates within VUB's Department of Water and Climate research ecosystem, leveraging collaborative networks across European and global Antarctic research teams as evidenced by multi-institutional co-authorship on recent publications.