Dear Authors,
thank you for the revisions and careful consideration of the reviewer's comments. I think you have satisfactorily addressed most comments. However, I would like to respect the wish of one of the reviews to see the manuscript again after revision. Therefore I will send it for review one more time.
Thank you for your understanding
Christian

Dear Authors,

thank you again for your careful revisions, and for considering the reviewer's comments so well. As you can see below your manuscript is now very excellent. However, a few minor technical corrections would be desirable as suggested below. I hope these can be easily implemented.
Thank you very much and congratulations to a very interesting manuscript

Christian Haas


Reviewer's comments:

The authors have done a good job revising the manuscript and answering to all reviewer’s comments.

Especially, the clarification of the description of the model equations along with the added appendix assists the reader. All equations that are necessary to understand the model physics are now part of the paper or the appendix. A description of the numerical scheme has been added as well to the appendix. The reference to the VP-rheology were put in the right context and specified in some cases with a good description of the different stress states. The authors corrected the simulations for the mentioned mistake in the redistribution scheme showing that the new simulations still back all conclusions drawn. In doing so, the authors responded to all major comments.

Thus, I recommend to accept the manuscript for publication with only very few minor comments:

- I would appreciate if the authors could provide the random field used for the computation of the initial condition for cohesion as supporting information along with the manuscript. If published, all information of initial conditions would be provided to repeat the experiments in a different framework and use this configuration as an benchmark experiment.

- page 4, l.4: “below its original value (2, Hibler, 1979). to increase the shear and uniaxial compressive strength ” please remove the period.

- page 27, Fig. 7: as there are no subfigures, “(a)” in the beginning of the caption is not needed