Thank you for an excellent submission to GChron. This article documents a new and useful R package that will be of interest to a broad cross-section of the journal’s readership. The paper makes a contribution both as peer-reviewed documentation of calculations and visualizations and also in furthering a long-term, community-wide discussion on methods for constructing and interpreting age models. The case studies presented are illustrative and interesting, as noted by your reviewers.

Thank you also for your thorough responses to the reviewers. The tutorials mentioned in the response to Dr. Hatvani look great. I note that several responses include minor additions to the manuscript, including Anonymous Reviewers #1 and #2, and the short comment from Dr. Mudelsee. The thorough author response to Dr. Mudelsee, which involves adding new functionality to the R package itself, goes beyond that required for publication here, and will further improve this contribution. I am pleased to accept this manuscript subject to the technical corrections you outlined in your responses to the referees and short comments.

Best wishes,
Noah McLean, Associate Editor

I agree with the associate editor that the software described by this paper is an important contribution. As requested by the AE, please submit a revised manuscript with the corrections outlined in your responses to the reviews.

I also have two additional requests for the authors.

The first request is to carefully reread the manuscript with the goal of removing or specifically defining poorly defined jargon terms as much as possible. As noted by one of the reviewers, overall this manuscript does a great job of clearly and concisely explaining concepts in fairly plain language without relying on mathematical descriptions. In several cases the concise descriptions of algorithms in this paper are much clearer than those in the original source papers. However, a few areas of the paper, mostly in the introductory material, rely on jargon terms that are neither plain English or clearly defined mathematical/statistical terms. Some examples of these are "ensemble-aware" and "context-specific" -- these are terms that are presumably intended by the authors to abbreviate fairly large ideas (i.e., that the quantitative method for interpretating some measurement as an age can be different depending on the geological context), but are, as noted, neither commonly used nor clearly defined. I am also concerned about the repeated use of "paleoscientific" and "paleoscience" in this regard, because although this term is used ad hoc in Earth science, it is not found in standard dictionaries and is susceptible to misunderstanding if interpreted based on plain English usage (if paleoenvironment is the environment that existed in the past, shouldn't paleoscience be science as it existed in the past?). Many areas of the text could be clarified by replacing this term with more specific terms or phrases, such as "records of past climate and environment," or "paleoenvironmental data." My point here is not to come up with a list of jargon words that I don't like and demand that the authors remove them, but only to request that the authors step back and critically reread the text so as to identify and remove jargon terms that are, as noted above, neither standard English or standard math.

A second, related, request is to read through the paper and make sure that all the important concepts in the paper that might not be immediately accessible to all readers are clearly defined. For example, where the important concept of "age ensembles" is introduced on p. 2 near line 15, it would be helpful to add some text briefly defining what an age ensemble is and how you generate one. This might involve sacrificing a bit of brevity for more clarity, i.e., something like "An important advance in understanding the implications of age model uncertainty is the idea of representing an age model not as a single age model that best fits a set of observations, but as an ensemble of many possible age models that all acceptably fit..."

So, overall, I am just asking the authors to read through the paper while pretending that they are not the authors, and try to identify terms that they already know or use commonly, but that readers might not. This would make the paper even more accessible to the target audience.

Thanks very much for contributing to Geochronology. I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.