Dear authors,

Your manuscript has been seen by two reviewers. They have both recommended that your paper be published: Reviewer #1 (“The manuscript is suitable in terms of topic for publication”) and Reviewer #2 (“This is a valuable contribution”). They have made helpful recommendations on the text and you have provided a clear response to their comments on your manuscript, modified figures accordingly (for example, adding currents, winds to Fig.1, “M events” and TERR input to Fig. 2, etc) and included references required to support interpretation/discussion.

I also found your paper nicely resolved; you are familiar with the study area and results are based on exquisite sampling and multi-proxy analytical work, with conclusions justified by data. The results of this study are of general interest.

My decision is that the manuscript merits publication in CP (Publish as is – once few technical corrections/amendments are included, please see below). Thanks for preparing and submitting this interesting paper.

Sincerely,

Belen Martrat

Few technical corrections as yet to be taken in consideration:
- lines, 16, 21: “Early Holocene”, use capital letter for “Early” following Walker et al., 2012, JQS. as suggested by Reviewer #1; in any case, there is an issue here because Walker et al. refer to “Early Holocene” the interval ca. from 11.7 ka b2k (before AD 2000) to 8.2 ka b2k, whereas the manuscript uses “Early Holocene” from 10 ka to 7 ka? (lines 141, 163, 271 for example); please maintain consistency throughout the text
- lines 23, 148, 265: “second part of the Holocene”, perhaps change to “Late Holocene”, but then be aware that Walker et al. refer to “Late Holocene” the time span from 4.2 ka BP (before AD 1950) onwards, whereas the manuscript uses “second half of the Holocene”, “Late Holocene” from ca. 6 ka BP to present? can the CR3 and HTE2 episodes –occurring ca. 4.2 ka- be of some reference in this regard?
- lines 182, 183 “the middle to late Holocene” same considerations
- line 154, 456: “FFT smoothing of the data.”, please define: “Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis”?
- line 461: table 3 caption: change "High TEER-alkane episodes (HTE)" to "High TERR-alkane episodes (HTE)"