Dear Dr. Westerhold,

Your manuscript has been evaluated by three reviewers. Their comments are quite clear and your proposed changes appropriate. I look forward to receiving the revised manuscript.

Sincerely,

Appy Sluijs
Editor

Dear Dr. Westerhold,

Your revised manuscript has been evaluated by the original referee #2, Stephen Meyers, who provides a very constructive review. Primarily, I agree with him that, particularly because of the fundamental importance of your work, producing the first complete Ypresian astronomical time scale base on a thorough compilation, and identification of secular resonance and chaos, a good manuscript can become an important one only if the complete set of statistical tests is included. So please do consider his advice in his section 1.1. In addition, please also consider his point 2, regarding XRF data quality carefully.

Secondarily, his point on obliquity during eccentricity nodes (1.2) and speculations regarding the influence of astronomical perturbations influencing mantle flow (3) would also be valuable for your discussion.

I shall be looking forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Sincerely,

Appy Sluijs
Editor

Dear Dr. Westerhold,

Thank you for submitting the revised version of your manuscript to CP. I am happy with your revisions and gladly accept your paper for publication. This paper will be of great value to the community.

I went through the manuscript once more and below I lay out the few technical corrections I think should be done. Your revised files will go to production without editorial interference.

Sincerely,

Appy Sluijs
Editor


P3. 23-27. Unclear sentence; please rewrite and/or split in two
P5. 8-11. Put years of publication between brackets, separate by commas instead of semicolons and include ‘and’ before final reference.
P5. 16. Faculty 5 Geosciences? Should this be Faculty of Geosciences?
P5. 21-22 / P6 10-11. Is the raw paleomag and nannofossil data also available in an online database? Specifically mentioned for the isotope data but not here.
P6 3. Delete comma after Perch-Nielsen
P7 34. Should be ‘regionally’ instead of ‘regional’ (adverb)
P8. 14. ‘can be identified at the Leg 208 sites’ (or similar)
P10. 3. ‘proven’ instead of ‘proved’
P10. 15 ‘the Tethyan realm’ (or similar) instead of ‘Tethyan data’
P13. 27. Please avoid starting sentence with a number; perhaps start sentence with ‘Due to the evolution…’
P16. 15-17. Please rewrite to: “Multiple carbon cycle perturbations are documented as negative carbon isotope excursions (CIEs) and the dissolution of carbonates at the seafloor, both pointing to massive releases of 13C-depleted carbon to the ocean-atmosphere system. Associated warming has led to the term ‘hyperthermals’ for these events.”
P16. 18. Add “If the 13C-depleted carbon caused the warming and all events were triggered by carbon from the same reservoir, the magnitude (instead of extent?) of the CIE’s are scaled to the amount of carbon injected (Pagani et al. 2006)…” These are the implicit assumptions Pagani’s paper made, and these are both under discussion.
P16. 28. ‘hyperthermal’ instead of ‘hypothermal’
P17. 19. Correct reference
P19. 6-7. To my recollection, the PE boundary is defined on the clay layer that corresponds to the steepest slope of the CIE at the GSSP (not the base if you will and also not formally defined on the CIE but the layer)
P20. 25. Diachrony, consider to use diachronicity instead
P21. 10. The community probably agrees that the Cramer et al 2003 paper was the first to try, but shown to be quite wrong due to incomplete records; ok to omit from citation for this particular statement.