Dear Dr. Mary and co-authors,

Your manuscript had received two very constructive reviews and a short comment, which are in good agreement with each other. They were enthusiastic about the quality of the dataset you have generated, but ask for more elaborate discussion of the mechanisms behind the observed changes, more linguistically accurate expression of thoughts, more background information about the sediment cores, and clearer provision of inferences and conclusions.

I encourage you to submit a revised manuscript version that addresses the reviewers’ requests as appropriate. Of course, as Ref#2 mentions and you also rightly point out in your response, this should not lead to an overinterpretation of the evidence.

Thank you for responding to the review of Referee#1 and to the short comment. It seems, however, that you did not respond to Ref#2 yet. Also your responses to Ref#1 were relatively brief and general, not responding systematically to each referee item one by one. When submitting your revised manuscript, I would therefore ask you to please provide a description of the changes you made, or alternatively, a manuscript version with the (relevant) changes tracked. Moreover, please respond to the comments of Ref#2 in the form of an Author Comment in the Interactive Discussion.

Thank you for stating that the data will be made available on Pangaea. I encourage you to archive the data there now already (protected if you want) in order to have them ready for release together with publication.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.
Yours sincerely
Thorsten Kiefer

Dear Dr. Mary and co-authors,

Thank you for revising the manuscript with careful consideration of the referee comments. The revised manuscript has been seen again by one of the referees of the first round. That referee is content with the modifications you made and supports publication. This is consistent with my own assessment. I am therefore happy to accept your paper for publication, subject to the technical corrections that the referee asks for, i.e. going carefully through the references and referencing, in oder to make them complete and consistent. I trust that you will do that with great diligence, so will not ask to see check the manuscript again before it goes into production.

I thank the referees greatly for their time and skilful and crucial work.

I also thank you for publishing your findings and data in Climate of the past.

Yours sincerely
Thorsten Kiefer