Biogeosciences Discuss., doi:10.5194/bg-2016-391-RC1, 2016 © Author(s) 2016. CC-BY 3.0 License. Interactive comment on “Identification of reworking in Eocene to Miocene pollen records from offshore Antarctica: a new approach using red fluorescence” by Stephanie L. Strother et al. Anonymous Referee #1 Received and published: 9 November 2016 Identification of reworking in Eocene to Miocene pollen records from offshore Antarc- tica: a new approach using red fluorescence. Stephanie L. Strother, Ulrich Salzmann, et al. November 2016 This paper approaches a really important problem in post Eocene Antarctic terres- trial palynology, which is the great difficulty in distinguishing contemporaneous pollen grains from those that may have been reworked from sediments deposited during pre- vious epochs. This difficulty results in significant uncertainty in reconstructions of post- Eocene Antarctic vegetation. C1 This is not a problem unique to this time or region, but is particularly pronounced in this setting due to compounding factors of 1) likely low contemporary pollen flux following large scale reduction of vegetation cover after ice sheet growth and 2) large scale reworking of sediments (and the pollen therein) due to glacial processes. The authors use fluorescence of pollen grains as a proxy for burial history, underpinned by the observation that fluorescence intensity decreases irreversibly with a combination of temperature and time. They suggest that measurement of fluorescence parameters will allow in situ assemblages to be distinguished from those assemblages that are dominated by reworked specimens. A really exciting advance on the use of fluorescence on Antarctic pollen, which they note has been explored before, is their extraction of RGB data and other parameters from digital images – which generates significantly richer and potentially more robust data than visual estimates of fluorescence. I believe there are two significant problems with this paper as submitted: 1) a lack of consideration of burial history and conceptual models for reworking. If this was included, it could lead to clear and testable hypotheses to demonstrate the presence and extent of reworking (or otherwise) in this setting, and 2) sample sizes. Burial History and conceptual models An explicit consideration of source areas and burial history/burial depth of source ma- terial the authors have examined is lacking. Their paper would be significantly improved by at least a conceptual model of the source of the reworked grains, and a clear hypothesis of how their results would look if there was (for example) no reworking, 50% reworking, increased reworking through time. In other words, to make the paper really useful, the reader needs to be guided more clearly on how to determine whether a new sample collected from (for example) C2