Thank you for submitting a thorough response to the reviewers and a suitable revised manuscript. As you have adequately responded to all reviewer comments, your manuscript is accepted pending some technical corrections, primarily related to readability. These correction are detailed below.

Best,
Alex Robel

Topical Editor
Geoscientific Model Development
Assistant Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology

————————

Technical corrections required before final acceptance:
(Page numbers and lines from diff’ed version)

Page 1:
Ln 1: resolution in ice sheet models
Ln 9-13: delete sentences starting from “We find…” to “…the complex bedrock topography of MISMIP+” These are quite specific results, and the abstract does not necessarily need them.
Ln 15: The ZZ estimator helps

Page 2:
Ln 9: Recently, WAIS has
Ln 10-11: under ice shelves, reduced the buttressing they provide to inland ice, and trigged the retreat of grounding lines around WAIS observed
Ln 14: accuracy of the result is
Ln 18: identify which intercomparison projects
Ln 27: as is the case for GL dynamics as defined in Schoof (2007)
(From the editor: To be clear, it is not necessarily the case that the step function in basal friction at the grounding line is necessarily the “right” way to described grounding line dynamics, it just the way that Schoof did it, and so is now commonly done in the field. Do note, however, that when the basal friction transition is smooth, as in Gladstone et al. 2017 in The Cryosphere, the resolution requirements at the grounding line are less stringent. Some have suggested this is a more realistic representation of reality.)

Page 3:
Ln 17: make it clear here that one or the other mesh generator is used, not both simultaneously

Page 4:
Ln 13: in many cores
Ln 17: of the mesh generators BamG
Ln 25: is the transition zone length specified by the user?

Page 5:
Ln 2: of an adapted mesh
Ln 6: transient ISSM simulations
Ln 29: Grounding line dynamics are implemented

Page 6:
Ln 1: flotation height

Page 7:
Ln 18: for an explanation of how these

Page 8:
Ln 7: n=3, a commonly used value for the exponent in Glen’s flow law
Ln 13: does accumulation rate have to be specified in order to reach a steady state? (I would think yes if there is ice outflow from the domain and it reaches a steady-state)
Ln 19: What about the reviewer comments regarding use of coarse mesh for initialization? Does this present a problem for these simulations?
Ln 31: SPE2?

Page 10:
Ln 7: the uniformly refined mesh

Page 11:
Ln 3: position differs
Ln 4: position differs
Ln 9: below in what sense?
Ln 10: not sure what marginally means here
Ln 25: terms of efficiency

Page 12:
Ln 17-20: you use inconsistent types of numbers to indicate the difference in computational times between these sentences (a % first, then a fraction of, then a factor less than). Perhaps switch to one common way to describe these, like a % of the benchmark non-AMR computational time.
Ln 17: L30?
Ln 21: is similar, and the ratio
Ln 29: terms of accuracy of the simulated grounding line

Page 13:
Ln 4: step, and is useful
Ln 22: ice sheet model
Ln 23: it is the case that these specific results depend on the particular topography and assumptions regarding basal friction across the grounding line.

Page 14:
Ln 10: implemented in ice sheet models, including those based on
Ln 21: there is no small-scale bed topography, the numerical error
Ln 28-29: the extension of the grounding zone (where…

Page 15:
Ln 1: The grounding zone is not
Ln 18: the grounding zone to reduce