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

Dear Doug Benn,
This paper received two detailed and substantial reviews that were very positive and suggested minor revisions and highlighted the clarity, novelty and significance of the work presented in the manuscript.
The authors addressed all the minor issues raised by the reviewers very well and corrected the technical/language issues. Therefore I am very happy to inform you that the paper will be accepted after correction/addressing of a few remaining minor/technical issues that are listed below.
I also thank the authors for their careful revisions.

Technical very minor comments/corrections:

p. 3. Line 57: typo, delete the ‘§’ after ‘those’

p. 5: citation of figure 3 (line 106) is now first and before figure 2 (line 108), so maybe swap the order of the two figures.

p. 17 line 425: ‘GREAT stability’ is a bit awkward, maybe ‘…clearly exhibited stability’ is better. p. 21 line 526: the full stop should be AFTER the bracket instead of before! E.g. ‘...ramp).’

p. 24 ine 610: this sentence ((cut-closure dominant process) probably only applies for ‘debris covered area’, if so should be made clear here.

in acknowledgments: maybe acknowledge input from referees.

Fig. 1: improve resolution/quality of Figure in final submission, any lines/writing are pretty blurred and the writing in the inset figure is almost unreadable.

Fig. 4: clarify in caption the difference between grey filled and white filled (whitte dashed lines). I guess they refer to upper versus lower level width of the channel. Further, first line in caption (line 917): change text to ‘…sections of englacial conduit…’ (rather than ‘…sections. englacial conduit…’).

Fig. 6: the solid outlined channel refers to upper level outlines but then the I assume the drawn boulders are probably lying on floor. So with upper level it means still the floor of the channel and not the ceiling?

Fig. 8 caption (line 937-938): I would rather say ‘…b) velocity difference between ‘annual’ period (29 Jan. 2015 to 5 Jan 2016’) and ‘winter’ period (19 Sept 2014 and 18 Jan 2015), indicating…’

Fig. 9: again improve resolution/quality of figure in final submission, right now I can not see any crevasses (only guess them). Further, crevasses probably occur AROUND the red line (not just AT the redline). the redline does probably refer

Fig. 11: again, improve resolution/quality of Figure in final submission, any lines/writing are pretty blurred and the labels hard to read.


The editor
Andreas Vieli