Dear Dr. Manning:

Thank you for submitting this interesting work to Biogeosciences. Both referees provided constructive feedback and identified the need for major revision. Based on your rebuttal, I believe that a revised version is acceptable for publication. I therefore invite you to upload a revised version. This revised version may be evaluated again by one or both referees.

With best regards, Jack Middelburg, Associate editor

Dear Dr. Manning,

First my apologies for the delayed processing of your manuscript. Upon submission of your revised version, I have contacted multiple referees and I obtained two that were willing to have another look at your paper. However, none of them delivered despite many reminders from the systems and some personal ones from me. I have therefore decided to evaluate your revised manuscript myself and based on this I have the pleasure to inform you that your paper is now accepted pending some minor technical issues. I congratulate you with generating such a high-quality dataset and a thorough analysis.
Please have a look at the technical issues listed below and upload a new version that will directly go into production.

With best regards, Jack Middelburg, Associate Editor

Technical issues:
p.1. line 14: sea-ice formation
p.2, line 10: mixing and grazing, and …
p. 3, line 9: .. the Atlantic Ocean primarily..
p.3, line 26: water-column chemistry
p. 7, line 4: write triple oxygen isotope in full because TOI has not been introduced before
p. 8, line 30: MODIS satellite images
p. 15, line 8: k600 values for injection..
p. 17, line 10: calculation (Manning et al., 2017).
p. 22, line 10: sentence is unclear; a word missing?
p. 22, line 20: delete , after GOP
p. 23, line16: phytoplankton, if the
p. 23, line 23: add superscript
p. 28, line 28: bottom-ice melt