The authors provide a thorough analysis of seismic modeling under various conditions, revealing complex multiples and strong guided waves associated with subglacial lakes. Additionally, the NMO-stacked images highlight the challenges in accurate velocity estimation. The comparison of different survey configurations offers valuable guidance for future active-source seismic exploration of subglacial environments. Furthermore, the field data supports these findings. Overall, this paper is detailed and informative, and I believe it should be accepted. I have only one minor suggestion: both Sections 3.3 and 4.5 are titled "Discussion." To improve clarity, they should be renamed to reflect their specific focus—for example, "Discussion on Seismic Data Processing" and "Discussion on Seismic Acquisition System."

See attached

Review of manuscript egusphere-2025-646

Seismic Acquisition, Modelling, and Data Analysis of Antarctic subglacial lakes

by: Kai Lu and Yuqing Chen

Bremerhaven June 18, 2025

Dear Authors

I really enjoyed this paper. It‘s well written, well-structured and a (to my mind almost) complete pre study of an upcoming seismic survey over the 2nd largest subglacial lake in East Antarctice, Lake Qilin. What active seismic method is best to locate a suitable drilling spot in this lake is the key question. The researchers used a geometrically simple acoustic velocity model of a 10km survey line over a hypothetical subglacial lake to create synthetic seismograms that are processed. In five steps the model becomes more complex and realistic, allowing identification of the received signals in these synthetic seismograms. Once these results are analyzed and discussed, three active seismic methods are analyzed and discussed. Their conclusions are used to analyze real data from Thwaites Glacier collected by one of the three methods.

The five models offer a lot of great examples and the stepwise built up is clear and good. However, I think it would have been great and logic to add one more step having the most realistic scenario for lake Qilin: a free boundary, firn layer and sediment bed. That would create seismograms you can expect to find doing a seismic survey over the lake.

My main concern are the conclusions as to what active seismic method is most effective to survey a subglacial lake. These are based on the modeled synthetic data sets and especially the workload definition seems hypothetical. Although these synthetic datasets offer clear insights as to fold, nr of shots, offset ranges and equipment needed, they ignore the reality of field work. Having to plant and dig out geophones, drill holes for shots and move equipment around is. I think here it is important to look at actual field data collection. I’ll recommend two papers that describe data collection and results in the field using a snow streamer and vibrator combination, (https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL086187) and (https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-2051-2022). We typically collect 20 km high quality 10-fold data daily with this set-up with three persons, a technician and two operators. Regarding the actual workload in the field: last season (ITGC-GHOST) at Thwaites Glacier, with the leap frog method, 13.5 km were collected in 9 days with 6 to 8 persons. The vibe-streamer method 137 km 10-fold data were collected in 12 days with three persons. When using explosives as a source with snow streamer, a fast efficient way to collect data is to use detonating cord on the surface. This is a fast source, has a large bandwidth, good resolution, no ghost, and in combination with a snow streamer is again much faster than frog-leap.

The figures of the models are generally good and need but sometimes need a better description and more information. Especially the captions seem somewhat hastily formulated with minimal information. This caused me to puzzle as to what is actually been shown.

The figures presenting the field data need better resolution. Also here the captions must be improved.

I attach the manuscript with my specific comments.

Thank you for this interesting manuscript.

Coen Hofstede,

coen.hofstede@awi.de