. (2010) 'Lithospheric cooling and thickening as a basin forming mechanism. ', Tectonophysics.,. pp. 184-194. Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.tecto.2010.09.014 Publisher's copyright statement: NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Tectonophysics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A denitive version was subsequently published in Tectonophysics, 495, 3-4, 3 December 2010, 10.1016/j.tecto.2010.014. Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

No abstract

Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Response to referees of Holt et al.We thank the three referees for their extremely helpful comments on the submitted paper, and appreciate the time that must have been needed. We have paid close attention to their suggestions, and feel that the revised paper greatly benefits from the constructive criticism. We take each referee's comments in turn, below, and offer a point-by-point account of how we have addressed them in the revised version. Our responses are preceded by the # symbol and are in italics.1. Five basins were chosen for the analysis. Why were these basins chosen? The main goal of this paper is to show that a lithosphere cooling model is a fundamental process in accretionary orogens. Therefore, the choice of the case studies needs to be carefully justified to show that these are 'typical' basins (i.e., there are no special conditions that could lead to a subsidence pattern similar to that of the cooling model). This is done in places in the manuscript, but it should be more explicit. At the moment, it isn't clear if the five basins are representative of accretionary orogens or if they were chosen because they fit the cooling model. 2. The cooling model is only vaguely described and no quantitative details are provided. Perhaps there should be a separate section with a conceptual description of the cooling model -why is it expected that accretionary crust has a thin initial lithosphere, what maintains the thin lithosphere, and what happens to cause the lithosphere to start to cool? It is stated that this model is different from a mantle delamination model (top of pg 4), but the 'alternate' mechanism for creating thin lithosphere is not clearly described. #Text has been added to explain the cooling model in section 2. There is also a longer description of why accretionary crust starts with thin mantle lithosphere in the Introduction. Both of these items were first described in Holt et al (2010): the only reason they were not originally given more length in this paper is that we thought readers would prefer a terse version of the material!In addition, the actual numerical values used in the cooling model need to be given. Readers are referred to the Holt et al. (2010) paper, but it isn't clear how this method was applied to the current study. For example: Do all regions start with a 20 km thick mantle lithosphere or does this vary (as implied on pg 15, line ~18: "an unusually thin initial lithosphere…is required")? How was crustal thickness var...

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.