Dear Dr. Dirksen,

Thank you for the detailed responses to the comments of the three referees. Your responses and proposed revisions to the manuscript indicate that you’ve given careful thought to concerns and suggestions of the referees.

I invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that conforms with proposed changes indicated in your response to the referees. With your revised manuscript, please also include a “tracked changes” PDF so that I can clearly link the manuscript revisions to your responses to the referees. Given the nature of the referee comments and your proposed manuscript revisions, your manuscript will be sent out for re-review.

Sincerely,
Alberto Reyes (handling editor)

Dear Dr. Dirksen,
Your revised manuscript has now been assessed by one of the original reviewers (Reviewer #3; full comments appended below). As you’ll see, the reviewer was impressed by your efforts to account for the suggestions/comments that arose during the review process. I will be happy to recommend acceptance of the manuscript for publication in Climate of the Past, pending some very minor revision to address some comments from the re-review.

Sincerely,
Alberto Reyes (handling editor)

*****
Reviewer #3 comments on revised manuscript:

The authors should be congratulated for taking the reviewers comments into account and producing a significantly improved revised manuscript. In particular I am happy that they have changed their approach for calculating oxygen consumption. This is a nice baseline study using a simple model to investigate the mechanism for sapropel formation from which more complicated models can be built as mentioned by the authors in response to reviewers.
I have the following minor comments, but if these can be appropriately addressed I recommend accepting this manuscript for publication..

Line numbers come from the marked up manuscript
Main Comment:
Line 268: Please provide justification for the assigned values of OCR and OCO .

Minor comments:
Line 74: “The previous offer..” >Please clarify previous.
Line 336: I still feel that the mention of runs are still coming put of the blue. I appreciate the authors views on not putting the parameters into the methods but maybe a sentence or even half a sentence in the introduction can be said saying something along the lines that multiple simulations are run to test sensitivity etc.
Figure 1: is it possible to add a scale for bathymetry?
Table 2: The run names fwb1 and fwbtot are only used in this table. Please link these acronyms to run names either in table caption or text

Dear Dr. Dirksen,
Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript, and for considering those remaining few comments from the last round of review. I'm happy to formally accept your manuscript for publication in Climate of the Past.

Sincerely,
Alberto Reyes (handling editor)