δO can be used with ice cores to determine the temperature from when the ice was formed.
Lisiecki and Raymo (2005) used measurements of δO in benthic foraminifera from 57 globally distributed deep sea sediment cores, taken as a proxy for the total global mass of glacial ice sheets, to reconstruct the climate for the past five million years.
The stacked record of the 57 cores was orbitally tuned to an orbitally driven ice model, the Milankovitch cycles of 41 ky (obliquity), 26 ky (precession) and 100 ky (eccentricity), which are all assumed to cause orbital forcing of global ice volume. Over the past million years, there have been a number of very strong glacial maxima and minima, spaced by roughly 100 ky.
As the observed isotope variations are similar in shape to the temperature variations recorded for the past 420 ky at Vostok Station, the figure shown on the right aligns the values of δO (right scale) with the reported temperature variations from the Vostok ice core  (left scale), following Petit et al. (1999).