Dear Sonja,


thank you very much for your replies to the two referees. Both raise substantial criticism to which you provided response, that, if translated into appropriate changes, could result in an improved MS. I would thus like to invite you to provide a new version taking the reviewers comments seriously into account. In particular, make sure that the journals scope is appropriately addressed and make clear how your findings differ from the previous works of Lizarralde and Benrdt and improve the representation of figures. I will then send out the MS again for review.

Best, Helge

Dear Sonja and co-authors,

your resubmitted manuscript was rated as “fair” by the reviewers. This score is actually to be understood as less than “good”, the quality limit Biogeosciences is striking for. I also went through your MS in detail and I agree with the reviewer’s assessment. Several of the points raised were not taken into consideration (and/or it is unclear why this was not done. That is why a revision should always be accompanied by a point-by-point answer to the reviewer’s concerns). For example, I mentioned that the figures need to be standardised with respect to style and font. To some degrees that has been done but not in all cases. There are still odd text blocks in the main text. For example figure captions. I presume that your intention was that it would be good to place the figures at the position where you placed the text block in question. But this is not a standard way of representing/placing this; it would need explanation to the reader and as a journal we cannot have multiple style options. That makes working with texts for the multitude of people involved in the production of a paper (science editors, print editors, reviewers) too chaotic.
Also, there are still multiple grammar issues, including language (to “hit a spot” with a MUC is something you can use in a causal way when talking with colleagues, but a MUC is not a ballistic object. Thus a phrase such as “sediment cores were recovered exactly at position XX… with the aid of…” or the like is more appropriately. Also, the use of tenses was not always appropriately: Results are usually written in past tense (something was measured). An exception may be when talking about some long-term features: water depth at the Marianna Trench is ~11km. Sediment layers from the early Holocene are... etc. Often you mix that up.
The biggest problem is still in the representation of the story. Ie, I understood that one important point is to show that in the study areas thermal activity ceased a long time ago, which has profound impacts on several geochemical aspects (eg. that methane is ± of a microbial source). But the entire paper is not introduced in this way. There is no statement of any aim at the end of the introduction. Rather, one gets the impression that you only want to present data (as stated at the end of the intro). There is often no read thread. Instead you write introductory paragraphs to some aspects (eg thermogenic methane) to just then reject them. Consistency needs also to be improved. In some cases you jump between topics, starting to introduce/discuss certain aspects just to talk about something else and then coming back to the initially introduced/discussed matter some paragraphs later. In this, one then misses important issues (eg why you investigated a carbonate crust, what it can tell you with respect to the overall aim of the MS).
Nevertheless, you have a nice data set and there is a good story in this. But it needs serious revision (not only of cosmetic nature!). If you think that you, together with your co-author team, can shape this into a good MS, then I welcome a sorry revision for further consideration. You will also find some more comments (mostly to the first part of the MS) in the attached pdf file.

Best, Helge

Dear Sonja and co-author team,

thank you very much again for submitting your interesting work to BG. After the successfully accomplished modifications, I would hereby like to accept your MS for publication.

With the best wishes, Helge