Dear Diane and co-authors,

I have now received the report by referee #2 who had also reviewed your original submission. As you will see below, the referee feels the manuscript has improved significantly and suggests minor revisions only. I agree with this advice. Please find the suggestions for revisions marked in the pdf file that can be downloaded from the link. My estimate is that the corrections will not require much time.

Thank you for the revision of your manuscript and we look forward to publishing the final version.

With best wishes,
Susanne

Dear Diane and co-authors,

Thank you for the revision of your manuscript addressing the remaining concerns of referee #2. I am pleased to accept your manuscript for publication in Solid Earth, pending a simple technical correction. What i would like to ask you is to see if you could reduce the number of abbreviations. I would say to avoid abbreviations in the abstract and in section titles. For the main text, please see if abbreviations are really necessary. FAB and SSC are for example only used 3x and FZ only 6x, meaning that these terms could therefore easily be written out. OP on line 12 is used without being previously defined.

As this is a really minor technical correction i am confident that it should take you no time at all. Thank you for this interesting and thorough study showing that spontaneous subduction initiation at transform faults is unlikely.

With best wishes,
Susanne

Please see my topical editor report above