Dear authors,

Your manuscript has been seen by two reviewers. The reviewers have both recommended that your paper be published: Reviewer #1 (Publish subject to major revisions) and Reviewer #2 (Publish subject to minor revisions). The reviewers have raised important and reasonable points and have made some helpful recommendations on the text. Thank you for your extensive and clear response to their comments on your manuscript.

I also found your paper to be an innovation on previous studies on the topic, as well as a very informative read. You provide a dataset for the circulation in a region and time span which are not often well described: the Eastern Mediterranean during S1 sapropel deposition. The results you present in the paper support the interpretations, figures are self-explanatory and clearly worked and generate a credible story. Concerning the S1 interruption period, I think the reader will very much appreciate your prudent alternative hypotheses about re-ventilation depths.

The manuscript can hardly be improved and my decision is that it merits publication in CP (Publish as is).
Thanks for preparing and submitting this interesting paper.

Sincerely,

Belen Martrat