Dear Dr. Jha and Co-Workers,

all three of your referees raised major concerns regarding the general organization of the manuscript, some methods and figures as well as interpretations. I read from your responses that you prepared a fundamentally revised manuscript, which will address the referee's comments. I therefore invite you to submit your revised manuscript to BG. It will be send back to some of the referees for a second review.

With kind regards
Tina Treude
BG Editor

Dear Dr. Jha and Co-workers,

the second review of your manuscript is now available. As you will see the reviewer is overall very pleased with your revision and suggest only just two minor edits. Please have a look and submit the revised manuscript with a short comment on how you addressed these requests.

With kind regards
Tina Treude

Dear Dr. Jha and Coworkers,

your manuscript is now suitable for publication in Biogeosciences after just a few technical corrections. Please see details below.

With kind regards
Tina Treude

Technical corrections:
Anaerobic and aerobic means "living with oxygen" while oxic and anoxic is used to tell if oxygen is present or absent. Please correct accordingly:
- P10/L24: "anaerobic" must be "anoxic"
- P11/L35: "aerobic" must be "oxic"