Decision of editor based on comments of two referees, minor revisions undertaken and the revised version of the manuscript.

Dear Andrew Hamilton and co-authors,
This paper received two detailed and substantial reviews that were very positive and suggested only minor revisions and highlighted the novelty, extensive dataset used and interesting and very well supported conclusions (short-term to long-term variations of the halocline in an epishelf lake, related forcings and implications on ice shelf thickness) presented in this manuscript.
The authors addressed all the minor issues raised by the reviewers very well and commented or justified their changes or non-changes in detail. Therefore I am very happy to inform you that the paper will be accepted after correction/addressing of very few remaining typos/technical issues that are listed below.
I also thank the authors for their careful revisions.

Technical very minor comments/corrections:

p. 3. Caption fig 1, line 6: there delete one of the ‘the’ before ‘freshwater layer’.

p. 3 line 14: is there not a ‘the’ missing in front of ‘last known’?

p. 9 line 25: delete the ‘in’ after ‘in more detail’.

The editor
Andreas Vieli

21st July 2017