Thank you for your careful consideration of the referees' comments in your responses. Please proceed with editing your manuscript to address all referee comments. After these major revisions are performed, the manuscript will be reconsidered.

Dear Sheng Fan and co-authors,

Thank you for your revised manuscript addressing the referees' comments. Please address the following additional comments to further clarify the manuscript:

Response R 1.2: Description of ‘(3) use ice as an analogue to understand the annealing of minerals at their melting temperatures.’, as mentioned in the response to referees, is missing in the manuscript.

Line 71: remove one of the ‘and’s, for example: ‘…at the base of many glaciers and ice sheets (Schmidt et al., 2023; Davis et al., 2023) as well as ice shelves (Schodlok et al., 2016, Pritchard et al., 2012), and is predicted…’

Line 141: should be ‘… ‘A’ and ‘B’ refer to…’

Line 420: should be ‘field campaigns’ instead of ‘field strips’

Table 1: The last row on Page 6 is missing the Sample Type (sample 12_P_A); the first row on Page 7 is missing the Annealing Time, Initial Median Grain Size, Measuring Grain Size – Combined Sections, Number of Ice Grains – Combined Sections (sample 12_P_B). If that’s intentional, place a ‘-‘ or ‘N/A’ to indicate that these blank boxes are intentional.

Section 2.4.3: I respectfully disagree that the broad readership of The Cryosphere will understand what the M-index is from what is included in this Methods section. As referee Stoll points out, it would be useful to include how the M-index calculates CPO intensity for the non-expert reader.

Section 3.3: You refer to a Section 3.3 in your response to referee Stoll (R 1.49), referee Wilson (R 2.5), and on lines 250, 285, 356, 358, 390, 395, 396, and 418, but it does not exist. Please check your Section numbering references throughout the text.

R 1.67 – this modified statement is not present in the present version of the manuscript.

R 1.71 – I agree that the bubble density does not appear to be ‘relatively stable’ in the data presented in Figure 8d. Explaining the jump from time 0 to 100 hours for each bubble size, and the difference in trend between the largest bubbles (orange squares) and the smaller bubbles would be helpful.

All the best,
Kaitlin

Dear Sheng Fan and co-authors,

Thank you for your thorough response to the additional comments and the revised manuscript. We are pleased to publish the manuscript in this final form at this time.

All the best,
Kaitlin