Dear authors,

Thank you very much for your thorough revision of your manuscript. I believe you have well responded to all the reviewers comments in a detailed manner, and updated the manuscript along the lines of most of their remarks. Given this, and since all three reviewers reckoned that your manuscript was worth publishing, I believe I can now accept it for publication in the Cryosphere.
English is not my mother-language, so I am still not fully sure that it is up to the reviewers standards. I suggest some formal changes here below for consideration in a final version of your revised manuscript, and I will still recommend language reprocessing by the editorial team to be sure. Please check the proofs carefully to guarantee that your thoughts have not been “betrayed”.
Attention!...I am referring to the line numbers in your “marked” version of your manuscript, at the end of your responses to reviewers!
l.6: “better” replace by “more suitable”; “elsewhere” replace by “others”
l.8: add: “basal melting, stratigraphic disturbances and sufficient …”
l.10:”locations” instead of ‘”sites”
l.11: “high-resolution” instead of “dense”
l. 24-25: “…(see Jouzel and Masson-Demotte, 2010 for an overview)
l. 31: “..see Young et al., 2017 for a precise description)..”
l.50: “the best” rather than “the better”
l. 52: “estimate” rather than “estimation”; “show more suitable” rather than “have better”
l. 67: “the water limit”
l. 68: “a future >1Ma drill site”
l. 69: “These authors” rather than “They”
l. 70: “that would keep basal ice”
l. 76: “..decision making process. This will be further discussed in section 3.5”
l.77: “The decision-making process for a future drill site location needs..”
l.80: “for a last high-resolution (few hundred meters scale) radar survey….the next field season.”
L.81: “The community should then be able to make a final decision for a 3.5 Ma drill site…”
l. 92: replace “being” by “is”
l. 114: replace “strongly” by “might considerably”
l. 115: replace “what happens” by “the”
l. 122: “where shearing might have more influence and/or the bed..”
l. 137-138: ambiguous!..  is the layer thickness for a single year, isn’t it?.. not 1/ (?)
l. 156: replace “regarding” by “in terms of”
l. 159: replace “influence of” by “sensitivity to the”
l. 196: “tends to”
Figure 2: mention what the “elliptical wavy area” is in the caption of d)
Figure 3 caption: “dashed red trajectory”
l. 217: replace “this” by “that”
l. 220: replace “undulling” by “undulating” (?)
l. 224: replace “this” by “our”
l. 230: “should now be guided”
l. 254: “is no guarantee that it actually is..”
l. 256: “deployed during the 2018/19 field season..”
l. 257: “the final site location is decided upon”
l. 271: BE-OI publication number ?

Good luck with it and congratulations!..

Jean-Louis.