Discussion: “Is spreading prolonged, episodic or incipient in the Andaman Sea? Evidence from deepwater sedimentation.” by C.K. Morley and A. Alvey (2015)

In 2005 I published a paper on the tectonics and geological history of the Andaman Sea, in which I stated again the idea that the Andaman Sea is experiencing sea floor spreading in a basin I called the Central Andaman Basin (Fig. 1). The sea floor in the basin shows signs of what my colleagues and I had previously postulated to be either episodic spreading or episodic deposition of sediment. In the first publication in which we had described this region in 1974, we had favored the idea that the spreading, and not deposition, had varied episodically. In my 2005 paper, I changed my interpretation to episodically changing rates of introduction and deposition of sediment, caused by glacial vs. non-glacial fluctuations of sea level. The recent paper by Morley and Alvey was mainly a discussion of my 2005 paper favoring the idea of an episodically varying rate of spreading. In their analysis, however, they state some other interpretations and differences in opinion. This short communication is mainly a rebuttal to their “discussion”.