CO Editor

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have made a thorough revision of their manuscript and also answered all my questions and concerns. I think that the manuscript now is ready for publications.

I still have a few suggestions and one question that could be attended to.

Page 4, line 32: Since “density” makes, at least me, to think about the density of the water column I suggest to change “pair a high density of 18O measurements” to “pair a large number of closely space d18O measurements”.

Page 6, line 4 and the following: Since lower salinities are located above higher salinities in the water column I suggest for clarity to replace “above the slope break” with “to the right of the slope break” and “below the slope break” by “to the left of the slope break”

Page 11, line 9: I assume that “influences from SIM” here refers to brine rejection (negative sea ice melt). Since this is in the summary and conclusion section it should be written out what kind of sea ice melt water input is meant.

Figure 3, panels g and h: The figure caption says that all stations on section L6 are plotted in blue. Does this mean that the figures have been mixed up and panel g shows section L6 and panel h shows section 5.5, or is the figure caption wrong?

Interactive discussion

Peer-review completion