Dear Niels and co-authors,

Based on the review reports and your author replies, I would encourage you to submit a revised version of your manuscript which incorporate the suggestions and comments provided, as outlined in your author replies.

With best regards
Steven Bouillon

Dear Niels and co-authors

First, apologies for the long time to reach a decision - I had hoped to secure a re-evaluation by one of the original reviewers yet this proved not to be possible.

You have transparently explained in excellent detail how both review reports were addressed, and I think the clarity of the manuscript has improved considerably, in particular regarding the reservations raised by Reviewer #2 regarding the resolution of your data (smoothing issues). This was the main concern and this is now well described in the revised version so that no ambiguity remains and readers can make their own correct assessment on how to interpret this.

I have listed a few minor changes below which I consider technical.
Line numbers refer to the revised (track changes) version


-throughout the text: use mmol mol-1, µmol mol-1, etc. rather than mmol/mol and µmol/mol, etc. This should be quick to replace.
-L76-77: the oxygen isotope values --> the oxygen stable isotope composition
-L257 and L 266: remove '*'
-L473 (Table 1): please provide a more complete Table caption - should be clear without consulting the text. Unless I'm misinterpreting, the different values separated by comma's refer to counts by different people, and values in bold imply correspondence between increments counted on outer surface and in cross sections ?
-L653: (Lorrain et al., 2005) --> Lorrain et al. (2005)
-L670: 'contradicts the assessment': would rephrase to indicate that the finding referred to would then not be generally valid.
-L738:(Carré et al., 2006) --> Carré et al. (2006)
-L745:(Gillikin et al., 2005) --> Gillikin et al. (2005)
-L774: idem
-L776: (Batenburg et al., 2011) --> Batenburg et al. (2011)
-L1253-1254 (Madkour, 2005): reference contains Arabic; I doubt that was meant to be the case. Egyptian Journal of Aquatic Research, 31,45-59
-new Figure S13: might be more accessible when chosing a dotted line and full line instead of two line colors. I think this is an important Figure to illustrate your measurement approach and its effect on to the temporal signal of element ratios- you could consider making it part of the manuscript rather than supplement, but leave the choice to you.