Dear Authors,

Thank you for providing a revised version of your manuscript. The reviewers have highlighted the scientific value of your work and offered helpful suggestions and questions that, I believe, can further strengthen the paper. Your responses to the reviews engage with the points raised; however, the track changes mostly show editorial adjustments. I will cross-check this with a re-review. Below, I have included a few comments from my side.

Kind regards,
Reinhard Drews

Comment 1:
The responses to the reviewers show a general willingness to engage with their comments. However, it is difficult to determine which changes were actually implemented in the manuscript. Some of the responses are also not very informative. For instance, the reply to the first major comment from Reviewer 2 — “The experiments are each distinct, and we include all experiments in the supplement for clarity. The simulations are summarized in Figure 8.” — does not indicate whether any changes were made (and which appendix you are referring to: the revised or the initial one?).

More concerningly, Figure 8 in the revised version does not summarize the modeling results; instead, it illustrates the past flow configuration of Conway Ice Ridge. Please make it clearer in your response letter which figure (revised or initial) you are referring to, and specify more explicitly whether and how changes have been made.

Comment 2:
Both Reviewer 1 and I found it confusing that you mention the derivation of bed return power in the Methods (line 121) and in the Appendix, but do not use it in the actual analysis. The response — “We included this for completeness” — without any corresponding change in the Methods is not satisfactory. Since two of three readers have raised this issue, others may also find it confusing. Only a small fraction of readers will refer to the Discussion for clarification. I suggest adding a brief statement such as:
“As explained in Appendix A, the inferred results appear unreliable, and we therefore do not include these findings in the subsequent analysis.”

Comment 3:
Both Reviewer 1 and I raised several questions about the age–depth modeling, and Reviewer 1 provided particularly useful suggestions. While you explained to me why a diagnostic 3D age field cannot be generated with the model, I do not see this clarification reflected in the revised manuscript (sorry if I missed it). It also seems that Reviewer 1’s suggestions are reflected in small corrections only. I will cross-check this with him/her during the re-review.

Dear Authors,

Thank you for responding to my comments and for implementing the revisions. The re-review noted that not all concerns regarding the presentation of the results were fully addressed; however, it is acknowledged that this is, to some extent, a matter of choice. The scientific quality of the manuscript has been evaluated as high by both reviewers, and I am pleased to concur with their assessment. Congratulations on this impressive combination of field observations and ice-dynamics modeling in a very interesting sector of Antarctica. I am confident that these results will be taken up by other researchers, and we should now move swiftly toward publishing the manuscript in The Cryosphere. For the next iteration:

-- update the links in the data availability statement
-- Consider choosing a different color marking the insets in Antarctica for Fig. 1. It took me a while to find them. Add spatial scale bars.
-- Make sure that the font size of axis labels for all Figures is sufficiently large and at high resolution

Again, congratulations and kind regards,

Reinhard Drews