Facies and Origin of Tufa Deposits from the Gostilje River Basin and the Sopotnica River Basin (SW Serbia)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper “Facies and origin of tufa deposits from the Gostilje River Basin and the Sopotnica River Basin (SW Serbia)” of Natalija Batoćanin, Wojciech Wróblewski, Ivana Carević, Uroš Durlević, Violeta Gajić and Aleksandar Valjarević, represents an example of tufa deposits developed in Serbia.

Off course, the description of such example is important because provide the possibility to the scientific community to have an overview of this type of deposits in Serbia.

By the way, there are several point of weakness that must be take in count by the authors:

 

at line 243 of the manuscript “we assume that sylvite is most probably of anthropogenic origin” …why?? There is a contamination related to anthropic activity?? This part must be better explained.

 

At lines 2275-276 of the manuscript “The lamination in stromatolitic tufa can be interpreted as seasonal changes in temperature and microbial growth [37, 39], but this assumption requires more detailed analyzes.” If you are not able to demonstrate this, please remove the sentence from the text or try to make a better comparison with examples reported in literature.

 

At lines 293-294 of the manuscript “According to the stable isotope data, all samples, despite their textural characteristic and lamination likewise in travertines, are considered tufa.” This sentence is not clear …We are talking about tufa deposits why lamination of travertine deposits is here considered? The reader does not understand the concept…

 

At lines 344-345 of the manuscript “Therefore, it is necessary to carry out further isotopic observations of analyzed tufas to specify their origin precisely”. I think that these types of sentences create confusion in the reader of the paper… moreover, if you do not perform this analysis there is no data to discuss.

 

I think that is important to have in literature papers that are able to show the presence of deposits never described at the international scientific community, but in this form the paper need a strong revision especially because is not clear the messages provided by the authors as for example “why these deposits are important?”

 

Moreover I think that more field phots regarding outcrops and or sequences of the deposits described will improve the quality of the data reported.

 

I think that in this form the paper is not suitable for publication and need a strong revision.

See also the comments in the pdf file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The responses can be found in the uploaded file.

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript reports reseach results of macro- and micro obersevtations and O and C stable isotopic composition for tufa deposits in two basins of SW Serbia. Based on the analytical data and comparison with the tufa deposits in other sites of Europe, the authors discussed the origin and the formation condition of the tufa deposits in Serbia. The manuscript is of high quality and has broad interest to the international reseachers, and can be accepted for publication after careful checking and correction on the writing of the text, for instance, Line 246, "Stable isotopes composition"; Line 247-249, "relatively values", "range between ... and ..."; Line 277, "analyzes"; figure captions of Figure 6 and Figure 7 are the same "Comparison of stable isotope data in this study with other deposits in Europe", please check.

Author Response

The responses could be seen in uploaded file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I have read again the paper of Natalija Batoćanin, Wojciech Wróblewski , Ivana Carević , Uroš Durlević , Violeta Gajić , Aleksandar Valjarević entitled Facies and origin of tufa deposits from the Gostilje River Basin and the Sopotnica River Basin (SW Serbia). Despite the fact that I agree with the Author aout the fact that is the firs paper regarding tufa in Serbia nd for this reason could be important for the scientific community I think that a litte explanation about the isotopic signature must be provided by the Author. Whyyour values are different ?? local condition?? climate changes?? The possibility to provide answers to these question could be very important also for the readers.

I suggest minor revision.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The answers to the comments are in the pdf file. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf