Geochemistry of Early Diagenesis in Sediments of Russian Arctic Glacial Lakes (Norilo–Pyasinskaya Water System)
, Sergey K. Krivonogov 1,2, Yuliya S. Vosel 1,*, Valery A. Bychinsky 3, Leonid V. Miroshnichenko 1, Alexei S. Shavekin 1, Galina A. Leonova 1 and Paul A. Solotchin 1Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
I have read carefully your manuscript, particularly because the environment in arctic lakes is very interesting. I had a lot of expectations about your manuscript but finally, I could not obtain a relevant conclusion. I would like to see clearly the differences between facies and the correlation between them in the cores. For this, the age of the sediments is needed. I am afraid you need some more data, especially regarding the processes of transformation of minerals: degree of pyritization and degree of pyritization of trace elements. And also it is relevant to highlight your main conclusions or differences in comparison with other similar or dissimilar environments. It is also important to distinguish natural (or diagenetical) sources of elements from anthropogenic sources. I would recommend performing a multivariate statistical analysis to cluster the variables and be able to obtain some more information. I have included many comments in an annotated manuscript. I hope this can help.
Best regards,
Comments for author File: 
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Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript investigates early diagenetic processes in two arctic lakes. Hereby, the authors try to exploit all the date they have obtained but, unfortunately, without much insight.
There is actually a fair amount of studies on lake sediments, notably on an array of siberian lakes (e.g. Lake Baikal, see Och et al., 2012, Chemical Geology). The authors may want to read up on the matter. The authors are all over the place - SiO, Ca, K etc. concentrations in pore water seem uninteresting and probably have little bearing on early diagenetic processes. I fthey would conentratre on the reactions they deem most interesting a manuscript with more depth could be submitted..
In general, the data sometimes looks doubtful (e.g. high Fe and Mn in Lake water, extremely high Fe content in sediments). It should also be checked, why there is actually very little nitrate and that nitrate increases with depth? That does not make much sense and should be explained more amply.
The sediments look like they show the transition from pre-industrial to industrial sediment deposition. I suggest to reappraise the data and see whether there is any interesting/novel hypothesis to follow. The manuscript as is has little scientific value and should be revised thouroghly.
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Reviewer 3 Report
Please check the attachment.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Line 124. How much?
1 ml per 1 liter of water sample.
Line 144. Explain?
A manufacturer of a device is usually specified. If not necessary, the technical editor can remove manufacturers in all places in the Methods section.
Line 488. What is this? Do you mean hydromica?
Yes. Fixed.
Line 511. unlikely
We agree. Our suggestion on the presence of the oxidized layer in the upper Lake Melkoye sediments was based on the Eh > 0 and the presence of Fe oxides and hydroxides proved by SEM. However, there is no sizeable increase of total Fe, which contradicts our suggestion. We revised our opinion by reconsideration the data and looking for analogues in literature.
The changed text is:
Accumulation of Fe2+ in the upper 40 cm of the Lake Melkoye sediments finds explanation that reduction of Fe (III) in the solid phase in this case is faster than the formation of new mineral forms of divalent iron [13, 16].
Academic Editor (Comments for Author)
Dear Authors, the manuscript looks well written and interesting. However, I think that there are too many references that are not accessible to the international readers since they are in Russian, I suggest , before peer review, to reduce the number of these references, and, if possible, to replace them with English written papers.
We have removed four references to Russian-language papers. Thirteen of 38 references are left. We cannot reduce more because the references left in the list refer to original data and concepts obtained by the predecessors. Frankly speaking, many of them should be available in governmental libraries abroad, like Library of Congress and university libraries. The interested readers can directly request the corresponding author for the hardly accessible publications.
The following references are removed:
33. Surface Water Resources of the USSR: Hydrology. Volume 16. Angara-Yenisei Region. Hydrometeoizdat: Leningrad, USSR, 1967. (In Russian)
34. Urvantsev N.N. Taimyr, my Northern Land. Mysl: Moscow, USSR, 1978. (In Russian)
36. Anoshin G.N., Zayakina S.B. Advanced Atomic Emission Spectral Analysis in Geology and Geochemistry. Novosibirsk University: Novosibirsk, Russia, 2011. (In Russian)
40. Perelman A.I. Geochemistry of Natural Waters. Nauka: Moscow, USSR, 1982. (In Russian)
