Dear Authors,

Your manuscript has received two reviews, none of which were supportive of the study as presented in its current form. According to your responses to reviewers' comments, I understand that you are able to argue against their criticism and plan to accommodate for some of their comments in the revised manuscript. As this research area is well outside my area of expertise, I cannot adequately judge on the basis of your responses whether those planned revisions will be sufficient to address the criticism and substantially improve the manuscript. But to allow you the benefit of the doubt, I do ask you to submit a revised version of your manuscript with serious consideration of the reviewers' comments. As none of the current reviewers expressed willingness to review your revised manuscript, I will need to find new reviewers to do so. However, please note that if the new reviews came out substantially unfavourable of your manuscript again, I would be more inclined towards rejecting it than allowing for another round of revisions.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns about this decision. Also, I would appreciate if you can provide a list of suggested referees.

Thank you,
Valentina

Dear authors,

Your revised manuscript was sent for another round of reviews (to different referees from those who reviewed your first draft). I've now received the two reviews (see bellow). Based on these comments, and especially the comments from reviewer #2, I ask you to address the raised questions and make the revisions accordingly. When ready, please upload the revised manuscript with point-by-point responses to the reviewers' comments .

Best regards,
Valentina

Thank you for your revised version that has addressed all the reviewers comments. The manuscript is publishable but subject to some minor revisions. Please find below my mainly technical comments regarding your revised manuscript.

Abstract: ‘meltwater disturbed its distribution’ does not really make sense -> please try to revise so that it’s more clear what process you want to emphasize here. Is it that the meltwater distribution within the the ice is more uniform?

Figure 1: the choice of the color for the lines is very similar: can you make one color red and the other black or dark green? Please consult with the color scheme recommended for scientific papers, for example:
https://www.simplifiedsciencepublishing.com/resources/best-color-palettes-for-scientific-figures-and-data-visualizations
Also , make with width of both lines a bit ticker. The panels have lots of white space, which is somewhat suboptimal for the size of the figure.
Also, the standard of x-y plots with just one y-axis to have the y-axis on the left. Please correct this.
Make sure to include any units in the brackets.
Add a label to x-axis, for example: Time (year)’. All axis need to have labels.

Figure 1: Make it smaller as the figures has too much white space and it’s unnecessarily wide. Make the new figure so that it can fit one column when published (I think that is 7.5 cm in width). You can enlarge the markers for the data points in the plot. The figure capture does not provide sufficient information: state in the captions the full name of CPS and Bq/L, and include their units if there are not unit-less. Units should be written within brackets. Also, provide more information on what you included in the figure: for example, coefficient of determination (R^2) and the linear relationship between CPS and Bq/L as obtained by a linear regression model or a linear fit.
Also, you state: ‘Errors on cps are 0.001’. Do you provide more details in the text on how these errors are obtained. If not, please do so. If yes, refer in the figure caption to that information in the text, for example: ‘Errors calculated from XXX (see the main text) on CPS are 0.001.’ Please note that some calculation cannot just randomly appear in the figure only, without it being explained or referred to in the main text.

General comments for the figure captions and main text: when you report a number smaller or equal to 10, spell the number our, so should be ‘three samples’ instead of ‘3 samples’. For numbers larger than ten, you should type them as numbers.

Figure 3: Caption: please make the full sentences, for example: Low resolution measurements referring to ice chips are shown in black dots, the observed activities and their error bars are shown in the histogram and their respective bars, etc.

General comments for the figure captions: Provide enough information in the figure captions so that they can be read as a stand alone, i.e. the reader does not need to dig into the text to figure out what you are presenting in the figure. Any abbreviations need to be restated.

Figure 4: The line widths, especially in panel (b) are too thin and barely visible -please enlarge the width where possible. Also, please increase the font size in all legends, titles, and axis labels. Make sure to restate what each abbreviation represents (e.g. SDI).

Figure 5: Again, y-axis should be shown on the left side of the graph. The panels have way too much white space, consider downsizing the figure The figure caption does not explain what the histogram represents (distribution?) and what the bars represent (error?). Make sure to restate what the abbreviations are and include all units.

Comments regarding you response to the reviewer:
You responded to the comments about the linkages to the SDI dataset, but did not make any revisions in the text. I suggest you address this issue in the text and state more clearly what the motivation was for the inclusion of the SDI data in the text (something along the lines you wrote in the response: no big peak is present in the SDI dataset at the same depth as the cesium main peak indicates that the Cesium peak is not due to an abundance of dust in this layer, and this should be important information since the Cs data is not calibrated on the amount of dust present but on the volume of filtered water, despite Cs being in particulate form).

Line 257: Revise to: ‘While the total tritium inventory associated with the 1963 peak in the Adamello ice core generally agrees with previous findings for cold glaciers not affected by melting, we find that this is not the case for 137Cs. ‘

Line 260: ‘that meltwater disturbed its distribution’ – as I pointed already above this phrase does not make sense.

Line 2601: ‘Such finding’ -> not clear to what finding you are referring to as this is a new paragraph. Need to restate in order to make this more clear. For example: ‘The results in this study indicate that there are possible issues ...’
Change to: ‘for a cold glacier’

General comments: Please make sure that a native English speaker reads your manuscript and helps you corrects some ungrammatical sentences and illogical phrases. I only ‘scratched the surface’ with my comments above but it seems to me that the paper would benefit from lots of minor corrections.

Thank you for addressing all the comments. Congratulations on the paper.