Post-Depositional Biodegradation Processes of Pollutants on Glacier Surfaces

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

70-78 This part has some bold claims but completely lacks citations.

91 - Both works by Grzesiak et al. (2015) demonstrate this issue more clearly than the ones the authors used.

96 - "ant"? The text needs checking for typos

106 "cryoconite had a low biological risk due to PAHs" - didn't you mean "regarding PAHs"? How can it contain PAH and have a low biological risk?

109-110 "was the main responsible...". Is this proper English?

115-116 "A large amount of biological, NaCl and mixed cation sulfate particles" - a barely understandable word sequence.

129 - supraglacial environments surfaces" - if it's a supraglacial environment then it already is on the surface.

128-130 This sentence is of poor quality, barely understandable.

153-155 Again the same problem as above - this is not proper English

223 - "conducing"? check for typos!

Author Response

Reply to reviewer’s comments

Reviewer 1

70-78 This part has some bold claims but completely lacks citations.

We thank the reviewer for the comment. We added the citations that affectively were missing.

91 - Both works by Grzesiak et al. (2015) demonstrate this issue more clearly than the ones the authors used.

Thanks for the note, we changed the citation.

96 - "ant"? The text needs checking for typos

We corrected the error. Thanks for noticing it.

106 "cryoconite had a low biological risk due to PAHs" - didn't you mean "regarding PAHs"? How can it contain PAH and have a low biological risk?

Thanks for the comment, we wanted to say that the biological risk that could be caused by PAHs is low. Clearly it was not clear and we changed it according to your suggestions.

109-110 "was the main responsible...". Is this proper English?

We changed the sentence, hope now it is better. Thanks

115-116 "A large amount of biological, NaCl and mixed cation sulfate particles" - a barely understandable word sequence.

Hope now it’s more understandable, thanks for the comment.

129 - supraglacial environments surfaces" - if it's a supraglacial environment then it already is on the surface.

Thanks for noticing the redundancy. We corrected it.

128-130 This sentence is of poor quality, barely understandable.

We hope that now the sentence is easier to understand. Thanks for the suggestion.

153-155 Again the same problem as above - this is not proper English

We adjusted the sentence. Hope that now it’s better, thanks for the comment. We also hope that the sentences we corrected are the ones you indicated as the lines didn’t match perfectly with the ones you wrote.

223 - "conducing"? check for typos!

Thanks for the comment, we changed the word.

Reviewer 2 Report

In the short review by Pittino et al., they briefly summarized the recent progress of biodegradation processes of pollutants on glacier surfaces. Overall, this is an interesting topic, as I have never seen such review before. 

1) As the authors indicated, there are limited studies on this field, and the authors did not have many ref to cite. I wish the authors could try their best to find more ref, since right now the less-than-50 ref is hard to be considered as a review.

2) there also lack details about the biodegradation process. The authors have mentioned that the contaminants could be degraded by bacteria on the glacier surface, I would like to know the concentration range of bacteria in the glacier. The author might need to survey on this.

3) The authors might also indicate how long the biodegradation process would take, since it should be relatively slow. Readers might need to get a comprehensive idea of this process.

4) The authors should pay attention to their grammar and typos.

Author Response

Reply to reviewer’s comments

Reviewer 2

In the short review by Pittino et al., they briefly summarized the recent progress of biodegradation processes of pollutants on glacier surfaces. Overall, this is an interesting topic, as I have never seen such review before.

1) As the authors indicated, there are limited studies on this field, and the authors did not have many ref to cite. I wish the authors could try their best to find more ref, since right now the less-than-50 ref is hard to be considered as a review.

We thank the reviewer for the suggestion. We tried to extend the text with more information regarding biodegradation pathways of the pollutants that have been studied in cryoconite.

2) there also lack details about the biodegradation process. The authors have mentioned that the contaminants could be degraded by bacteria on the glacier surface, I would like to know the concentration range of bacteria in the glacier. The author might need to survey on this.

We added the information requested, as effectively are important to complete the topic of the review. Thanks for the comment.

3) The authors might also indicate how long the biodegradation process would take, since it should be relatively slow. Readers might need to get a comprehensive idea of this process.

Thanks for the comment, as there are many factors influencing the degradation rate we tried to give the necessary information to have an exhaustive overview of these dynamics.

4) The authors should pay attention to their grammar and typos.

We thank the reviewer for the comment, hope we found all the typing errors