Revised version April 2015

Editor decision and comments

The authors have addressed (or justified) the raised points by the reviewers and editor satisfactorily and only very minor mostly technical corrections remain.
Thus, the publication can be accepted for publication after addressing the few minor technical/editing issues listed below:

General
I am somewhat confused about the critical Damage Dc. You refer as depth (and unit of (m) in table 1), but D is a unit free Damage variable between 0 and 1, so I q^would assume Dc is the same unit (meaning no units). P. 7, line 25: clarify what you mean with saying ‘…gives a shape to the depth…’.

Fig. 7: something is odd/wrong with this figure: I just saw that the timing of the onset or peak in the backforce (a) or in the frontposition (b) is actually not always at the same time of the year (see x-scale at figure (c)) and seems shifted (e.g. not one year period). Probably something has been changed on the x scale in (c) but not in (a) and (b). Please chaeck and correct this.
I only saw this because in the leter years the min velocity occurs with max. retret which is odd.

Detailed corrections
p 2, line 4: ‘…variations AT the calving front…’.

p. 2, line 5-6: just my opinion: I would rather write ‘…a finite eelement based model that solves the full-Stokes equations to simulate….’ (rather than give the ‘brand’ of the model and not give the approximation; you could run Elemer/ice also for SIA).

p. 3, line 10: ‘…is therefore a significant…’ (not ‘an’)

p. 3 , line 27: strictly speaking, ‚process’ is not quite the right word as ‚ice-melange’ is not a process. Maybe ‚Another quantity, that of....’ would be better.

p. 11, line 23: not clear why you have brackets there, just say: ‚...the subglacial freshwater discharge...’ (and remove the apostroph.

p. 16, line 8: ‚...Fig. 8 shows the mass loss for all geometries for ...’

p. 19, line 22: ‚...Incorporating melting from underneath the floating ice tongue...’

p. 21, line 3: somwaht awkward new sentence, maybe change to: ‚...However, it is important to note that the model....’

p. 21, line 7: i would be more specific here and say: ‚...showed that frontal melting...’

Editor, Andreas Vieli