Dear Dr Ehrmann and co-authors,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to Climate of the Past.
Based on the reviewers' comments and your responses to them I would like to invite you to submit your revised manuscript following minor revisions. When submitting your revised manuscript, please provide both a clean version and a track changes version with the respective changes clearly indicated. Please also attach your responses to the comments, aligning with the changes done in the revised manuscript.

Kind regards,
Antje Voelker
Editor, Climate of the Past

Dear Prof. Ehrmann and co-authors,

Thank you very much for sending your revised manuscript. The changes you have made in response to the reviewers comments have improved the manuscript and clarified the issues raised. So, in general, your manuscript is acceptable for publication. There is, however, one technical correction that needs to be done prior to publication.

While reading through your revised manuscript I encountered a scientific "error" in figure 4 that needs to be corrected before publication. In the power spectrum for smectite the number 113 should be deleted. Or you need to acknowledge in the figure caption that that spectral peak should be ignored as it is not statistically supported. A cycle is only statistically valid if it can be found at least three times in the time series, which is not given by the length of your time series (only twice the length of the indicated cycle). To me that spectrum looks like one that should have been filtered for the "eccentricity" frequency range and the spectral analysis then performed on the filtered time series.

Kind regards,
Antje Voelker
Editor, Climate of the Past