into the sediment of the South Pacific gyre ” by

Final response to Referee 1 (anonymus) We thank referee 1 for his/her comments and the opportunity to clarify certain misun-derstandings. Answers to the referee’s specific comments are reported point by point. Changes in the text are located by the number of the corresponding line in the original manuscript. As the reviewer points out, our manuscript represents a novel data set on oxygen pro-files in oligotrophic sediments. This is true not only for the deep penetration of oxygen, but also for oxygen flux measurements in the southern Pacific Ocean. There are data available from the central Pacific (mentioned by reviewer 2 and now incorporated in the discussion) and other oligotrophic sites but those data are still very limited. Benthic C687 oxygen fluxes provide a good and integrated measurement of the metabolic activity of surface sediments. They quantify benthic carbon mineralization rates and thus can be used to evaluate the efficiency of the biological pump (export of organic carbon from the photic zone). We believe that our data can contribute to the regional understandin