Dear Authors,

The paper has been revised by one of the original referees and a now referee (Graham Cogley). You will see that they still have a lot of comments. I urge you to take the time to take VERY carefully their comments into account and only send us a version of the paper that takes them all into account.

You will find their assessment below or attached.

To facilitate the review process, please attach to your revised manuscript a cover letter detailing the changes you made in response to ALL their comments. Make sure this rebuttal letter makes a clear distinction between the referee comments, your responses and the changes to the manuscript. The previous rebuttal letter was not clear enough.

Best regards,

Etienne Berthier

Dear authors,

I have a profound respect for the time of the referees. Neither I nor them are here to clean the typographic errors.

After reading just the abstract and the first sentence of the revised manuscript (MS), I found already that you introduced new errors. I did not go further. I will ask you to read the paper more than carefully and, if needed, ask an English-speaking colleague to proof it and then only upload the revised MS another time (still containing the changes you made since the previous version). Your rebuttal letter (with typos) also suggests that you rushed through the revision. I recommend quality not rapidity.

I will read the paper very carefully next time and I am still ready to reject the paper if you did not spend sufficient time to take into account the comments.

Three examples of typos introduced/remaining:
P2. L10 Cogley said “The relation between the 1999 topographic map and the year 2000”. Where does the remaining year 2000 in “from 2000 to 2006” come from?
P2 L19. “observed during the study period seems do not sufficiently explain” is simply not grammatically correct.
P3 L5. Cogley said “And strictly the LIA culminated rather than ended then” and you wrote “cumination”. This is minor of course but simply not acceptable! This is where I stopped reading in details.

Below some of the comments that you did not take into account and that you need to:
Cogley: “The greatest thinning was at …”. Consider rationalizing the terminology; we have had “depth loss”, “thickness decay” and now “loss of thickness”. “Thinning” would be clearer than all of these.
EB: As early as in the abstract one get confused because you provide “ice depth decrease” (positive) and a negative number that is not defined, presumable a glacier-wide mass balance??? My recommendation is to use signed values everywhere preceded by “(rate of) surface elevation change”. To avoid any ambiguity. Check all signs carefully then.

Proximal/Distal are unconventional and myself I do not know what it means. “lowest elevation” or “lower reaches” seem like reasonable alternative (unambiguous at least).

Unit: I do not have big problems with merging of units (m and m w.e.) however authors need to explain clearly what they provide. For example in the abstract a value in m/yr w.e. is provided but the reader does not know that this is a glacier-wide mass balance (I presume?).

Table 2. Check the errors carefully. 0.25 + 0.27 ≠0.47. Again this is not acceptable.

This is your last chance,

Etienne Berthier

Lopez-Morelo et al.,
Revised version, March 2016

Dear Authors,
Thanks for the revision of your paper and for taking into account or answering to the reviewer’s comments. I believe that the proof-reading was useful and will increase the impact of your paper.
I have thus the pleasure to accept your manuscript for publication in The Cryosphere after taking into account the minor edits provided below.
Thanks a lot for choosing The Cryosphere to publish your work,
Best regards,
Etienne Berthier

My final editorial comments:
4.8 It means a reduction in area of 34% in only 3 years between 2005 and 2008. This is not realistic, this is huge. Must be due to technical differences between the two studies rather than real glacier changes. Could the authors double check the studies and modify the text accordingly?
8.14 “are referred to this paper” --> “are referred to in this paper”
12.21 40 cm --> 0.40 m for consistency
21.7 single parenthesis.
22.8 space missing
22.9 I do not think Marti et al., 2015 is the right reference here because they did not study the Maladeta Glacier. Authors should double check but it is probably better to cite directly the original study on Maladeta or the WGMS database (for the updated values).
22.19 “Ossoue Glacier”
36.18 space missing and “of”