Thanks for submitting your rebuttal. Your responses are clear and promising, addressing the deficiencies identified by the reviewers as possible. I await the revised MS for a final review.

Cheers,

Joe MacGregor
NASA/GSFC

Dear Dr. Jordan et al.,

Thanks again for your submission to The Cryosphere. I've reviewed your revised MS and consider it responsive to the reviewer's comments. The MS is substantially improved and the potential significance of the two ice-shelf populations is now much clearer. Below I only have a few minor technical corrections for you to consider.

17: Glacier

23: For the abstract, be more specific than "new", because what is meant could easily be unclear to the unfamiliar reader. Perhaps something like "recently formed" or "recently floated". New is too vague and could imply that a new ice shelf formed from ice flux>(melting+calving) at a grounding line, rather than expanded inland.

19: tens of kilometers

94-96: Clarify platform used and speed, in a similar to OIB above.

99: Good spot for a paragraph break?

288: The discussion surrounding the two ice-shelf populations is much improved, but both earlier in the MS and here it's not so clear what the spatial resolution of this intercomparison is. I'm assuming it's the 1 km grid size, but is that appropriate for this intercomparison given the resolving power of airborne gravity? I kept expecting this issue to be discussed, but never saw it. The improved Figure 5 gives confidence in the significance of the difference, but I suspect it's less data-rich than implied here.

Figure 5: Include number of values (n), even better (given comment above), number of independent samples if possible?

Thanks again for submitting your work to The Cryosphere,

Joe MacGregor
NASA/GSFC