Dear Dr. Thorsten,

thank you very much for this nicely re-worked MS, which I would like to accept. There's only a few minor things, I'd like to ask you to implement in the text:

P8, L10 add that MBT/CBT is often complicated because allochthonous brGDGT signals may be overprinted by autochthonous brGDGTs (eg. Tierney and Russell, org. Geochem 40, 2009; Schouten et al., Org. Geochem. 54, 2013; Weber et al., GCA 154, 2015). This strengthen your argument for the need of additional T-proxies.

Fig 4 panel indications are missing (a-i).

I leave this up to you as it is more of personal preference. Consider to use more contrasting colours for Fig. 3 and Supl. Fig. 1: ie., red, green, blue, black, grey, white. The ones you used, brown, red, yellow, olive (I guess earth tones would be the appropriate description) do not have lots of contrast and are hard to distinguish for anyone with a color vision deficiency - ~9% of the male- and ~1% of the female population.

Thanks again for submitting your work to BG, Helge (Editor)