Dear authors,

Please proceed with the revision of your paper, following very closely all the suggestions of the reviewers which will enhance the quality of your paper.

Best regards,

C. Rabouille

Dear Dr Keil,

Thank you for the revised version of your manuscript, which I believe is almost ready for acceptation. I understand that the revisions you made were significant and followed the reviewers comments except one point concerning the statistics.
Yet, your response letter was not descriptive enough of the changes made to guide me through the new version and encompass all the alterations made to the former reviewed version.
Therefore, I cannot accept the paper as is.
Please:
- provide a more detailed response letter describing point by point how you answered the reviewers' comments, including the detailed comments of reviewer #1.
- Provide better quality figures as the pdf provided is of too poor quality to be read (depth labels for example).
- Last point concerning the statistics: I agree with the fact that the metrics is complex as the uncertainty for sediment trap fluxes is difficult to assess rigorously. You should, however, present the data of Figure 2 (which are key to your paper; page 7 line 7-12) with more details by explaining the different data points on the graphs: do the different dots for one station at similar depth correspond to different deployments or duplicate measurements as stated in the method section? If these are different trap deployments, it can give confidence to the reader that the fluxes are different between the stations.

Thank you very much in advance,

Best regards,

C. Rabouille, guest editor

Dear Richard,

Thanks for your revised version and the detailed response letter which helped in my critical reading of the revised manuscript.
This new version with re-organisation of the paper is largely improved, with a new mechanism, linked to Temperature, added.
This has imposed partial rewriting of the introduction and discussion. Yet, some parts where the mechanisms (M) are quoted (page 9 and 15) were not modified from the initial manuscript and introduce confusion in the reading.
Specifically:
- Page 9 line 31 to top of page 10: The mechanisms listed M1-M6 correspond to the old mechanism list and do not match with the new discussion sub-titles. Please modify these lines at the end of page 9 to match the new discussion
- Page 15 line 32 to top of page 16: Again the list of mechanisms does not match the new discussion but the old one (with M6 being sinking speed instead of T). Please update it.

Also, for the Figures, I do not see a difference in resolution. The only one I have are in the pdf file: axis titles and labels are still too small, the colour figures are fuzzy. The publication department will certainly require better figures that you may have produced, but I did not see them in your revised manuscript.

Thank you in advance for the very minor revisions to come in the discussion. After that, your article will be forwarded to the publication department,

Best regards,

C. Rabouille, invited editor