Dear Dr. De Rydt et al.,

Thanks again for submission of your manuscript. Your response to the two excellent reviewers’ comments are thorough, and the manuscript is noticeably improved as a result. I have a few minor comments for your consideration prior to a final decision on your manuscript.

Thanks again for considering The Cryosphere for your work,

Joe MacGregor
NASA GSFC

8/8: I don’t understand the qualifier “little or no” to the “observable grounding” here. From Figure 2a, it seems clear that the BIS must be grounded at least a “little” at the MIR, because the surface velocities imply higher stresses there prior to 2000 than across any other part of the terminus.

11/13: Would it still be accurate and perhaps more familiar to a greater variety of readers to describe this analysis as a “hindcast” rather than “back-testing”?

13/10: “fast collapse” is evocative, but once Chasm 1 and Halloween Crack meet and the BIS loses a large chunk of its area, will it really have “collapsed”, let alone in a “fast way”? The process will have taken several years, much slower than for Larsen B, and a significant fraction of the BIS area/volume will remain.

13/14: Here it seems necessary to start Edwards et al. (2019, Nature), otherwise the reference to MICI being “controversial” lacks context.

Grammar/spelling/etc.:
1/10: A simpler way to say this is “Here we use two decades of in-situ and remote sensing…”
1/14: A comma is critically needed here: “disintegration, are currently”
1/18: I think a better response to Reviewer #2’s comment on this statement is to change the start of the sentence to “Larger calving events…”
2/16: “a” is no longer needed for Lipovsky et al. (2018)
10/1: For both periods, we interpret…
11/10: m/d, not m/yr
24/1: Leave it to the readers to decide whether Figure 3 constitutes “An effective demonstration…” Start the caption with “Reduction…”

Dear Dr. de Rydt et al.,

Thanks again for your substantial efforts in both producing this study and in improving it through a careful response to reviewers' comments. The manuscript as a whole is bold and informative, and I expect will motivate many to explore its implications for Antarctic ice shelves.

I'm happy to recommend publishing as is.

Cheers,

Joe MacGregor