Reply to Lovell, B. 2022. Comment on Green, P., I. Duddy, I., and P. Japsen, P., 2022. Episodic kilometre-scale burial and exhumation and the importance of missing section. Earth-Science Reviews 234 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.104226

We thank Lovell for his comments on our paper describing events in which kilometre-scale thicknesses are deposited and removed, resulting in the phenomenon of “missing section”. Lovell proposes that these events can be explained by mantle convection and dynamic topography, based on examples of domal uplifts interpreted to represent dynamically supported swells with a vertical deflection of up to 2 km at the centre. However, while mantle-driven processes may contribute, in part, to kilometre-scale exhumation the examples cited by Lovell do not accurately reproduce the events described by Green et al. (2022), which involve burial and exhumation, often in multiple episodes, and affect regions over vast distances broadly synchronously. Thus, detailed understanding of the underlying mechanisms remains elusive.