Dear authors,

thank you very much for your carefully revised manuscript and author responses. The paper improved significantly and addresses all reviewer comments - it can now be accepted for publication upon addressing the technical corrections listed below.

Thank you very much again for submitting your work to The Cryosphere.
Kind regards,

Christian Hauck
Editor
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ABSTRACT:

First sentence: This is a quite a strong and general statement ("have significantly increased"), which is not addressed or proven or referenced in your paper. It would be better to use the wording of your own Introduction (p1, l.28) as a more general introduction of your abstract.

SECTION 2.3 EXPERIMENTAL SET-UP:

p10, l219: "ventilation prevented thermal...." and "...with two sensors was fixed..." - use the past tense consistently for your experiments (which you mostly did, but not always)

p10, l.222: "shear velocity were adjusted..." (see comment above)

SECTION 2.5

p11, l261: "The linear fitting...": which linear fitting is meant here? which variables ? It seems like a too general statement here or I do not see the link to the preceding section.

FIGURE 4 - CAPTION:

p12, l270-275: the symbol "sigma" has not been introduced so far as far I can see

p12, l270-275: the stage "V" is not written in the caption although it is addressed as "post-peak strength" (I guess).

SECTION 3.4: FAILURE CRITERION:

p16, l362: "...between 0.12-0.40 for the coefficient of friction.": In fact, the subplot on the upper right-hand side of Figure S8(a) does not seem to show a linear relationship at all (so the low R2 values are not surprising). What does that mean for the validity of the criterion, which assumes a linear relationship ? You do not address this uncertainty explicitly in the text, although it is implicitly treated afterwards in the validation plot. But a sentence at this point in the text which addresses the implications would be appropriate.

SECTION 3.4:

p18, l390: "Equation (4)" instead of "Equation (6)" ?

p18. l394-398 (incl. Eq (5)): see Figure S8 and comment above: the relationship is not linear in Figure S8: How are the rather accurate values and error levels given in l.396 and 398 are affected by this simplification ? This discrepancy should be mentioned here.

p18, l404: "Equation (5)" instead of "Equation (6)" ?

SECTION 4: DISCUSSION

p18, l418: "We used..." and later: "...for ice-filled permafrost rock joints (Equation (6))..."
Otherwise it becomes not clear whether you mean Eq. (6) or another criterion to be discussed in the reminder of the manuscript.

p19, l444: remove semicolon after the last reference

p20, l456: "...approximately 0.5 times higher than..."

p20, l461: "...is less important for the following reasons:"

SECTION 4.2

p21, l492: "Here, we have developed a failure..."

p23, l524: remove comma after "...ice-filled rock joints"