Dear Joanna Pawlowska and co-authors,

Thank you for sending your responses to the reviews of your manuscript “Multiproxy evidence of the Neoglacial expansion of Atlantic Water to eastern Svalbard: Does ancient environmental DNA complement sedimentary and microfossil records?”. I invite you to resubmit your manuscript after major revisions. Please provide a revised manuscript where all changes to the manuscript is clearly visible and easy to track.

The paper will be sent out for review again after receiving the revised manuscript. Please make sure to take all the reviewers concerns into account.

Best regards,
Bjørg Risebrobakken
Editor, Climate of the Past

Dear Joanna Pawlowska et al.

Thanks for submitting a revised version of your manuscript “Multiproxy evidence of the Neoglacial expansion of Atlantic Water to eastern Svalbard: Does ancient environmental DNA complement sedimentary and microfossil records?”, CP-2019-21. I have now received two reviews of the revised manuscript, both still suggests major revision. I will encourage you to take all their comments into serious consideration, to read carefully through the manuscript, check if enough, or too many, details are given, if the statements given are correct and reliable, and to make sure that the message you want to convey are clearly presented. The introduction should clearly present what you want to do, and why. I agree with reviewer 2 that the manuscript would have a broader interest if you see your results in a larger context, beyond Storfjorden.

I will look forward to seeing the next version of your manuscript.

Best regards,
Bjørg Risebrobakken
Editor Climate of the Past

Dear Joanna Pawłowska and co-authors,

Thank you very much for submitting your revised manuscript “Multiproxy evidence of the Neoglacial expansion of Atlantic Water to eastern Svalbard: Does ancient environmental DNA complement sedimentary and microfossil records?”.

The manuscript has been significantly improved. I have gone through the revised manuscript and have some minor comments that I would like you to address (added in the attached PDF). In addition, it is not totally clear from your responses how you have responded to some of the minor comments from reviewer two in the last round of revisions. I see that you have submitted the paper to professional language editing and do not expect a response to the individual language comments. However, in-between those that are some questions raised where responses are not indicated. I would appreciate if you can provide some added feedback here in addition to the comments from me.

I will look forward to the next version of your manuscript.

Best regards,
Bjørg Risebrobakken
Editor, Climate of the Past

Dear Joanna Pawlowska et al.,

Thank you for sending your responses and revised manuscript. I still have some minor questions with respect to some of your responses that I would like you to address.

Best regards,
Bjørg Risebrobakken
Editor Climate of the Past

Page 4. line 32: None of these references focus on the oceanography upstream of the Barents Sea. Rudels do not mention the NAC, while Loeng mention the Norwegian Atlantic Current (NwAC). Most often the NAC (North Atlantic Current) is used for the North Atlantic, and then it transfers into the NwAC when entering the Nordic Seas. Please add a more relevant reference.

Page 8. Line 31: I am glad you longer say its stable, but I don’t really think you can say much about changes either. Maybe the most honest thing will be to be very specific and say something like “The two d18O data points prior to 2.7 cal ka BP record values of 3.55‰ and 3.69‰ vs. VPDB”.

This feeds back to comments raised by the reviewers as well, relating to how you cannot really say anything about the time interval prior to 2.7 cal ka based on your data. The change at ca. 2.7 is well known from the Barents Sea, and therefore it makes sense to show that part combined with references to how low sedimentation rates are a common feature for large parts of the western Barents Sea through the mid Holocene. But it does not make sense to make any statements on stability of variability/changes taking place based on those two data points.

Page 13, line 14-20 and your response to past page 13, line 9: Yes, several records show a change at ca. 2.7 ka, as you do. Several of these records also show quite some variability within the last ca. 2.7 ka, even if the papers focuses on the longer term trends/conditions (e.g. Groot et al., 2014; Berben et al., 2014; 2017; Risebrobakken et al., 2010). Especially, the studies by Groot and Berben are close to your site, and shows repeated variability e.g. in benthic foraminiferal flux and sea ice through the last 2.7 ka. They may not go in detail with respect to these events, due to a different focus of their work, however, I would still expect a discussion on how your events are related to the overall variability of relevance in your study area, not just the one records that looks most similar. What happens at your site is not independent of what happens at nearby sites.

Figure 5 and 4. Please add dots where you have measurements not only in the abundance plots but also in the flux plots.

Dear Joanna Pawlowska et al.,

I will accept your paper subject to technical correction. The data policy of CP states that “Authors are required to provide a statement on how their underlying research data can be accessed. This must be placed as the section "Data availability" at the end of the manuscript before the acknowledgements.” For more information on the data policy, please check: https://www.climate-of-the-past.net/about/data_policy.html. Hence, before the paper can be finally accepted for publication you must make sure that the data presented in the paper will be publicly available upon publication and that its clearly stated where the data can be accessed. I do not find information about data availability in the paper and will ask you to add it. I am sorry that I did not notice in the last round.

Best regards,
Bjørg Risebrobakken
Editor Climate of the Past