Response: Discussion of 'Morphotectonic records of neotectonic activity in the vicinity of North Almora Thrust Zone, Central Kumaun Himalaya' by Kothyari et al. (2017), Geomorphology (285), 272-286

Rana and Sharma (2017) dispute our tectonic interpretation mainly on the basis of what they believe (climate?). However, we welcome their comments, as this gives us a chance to highlight the ambiguity inherent in discriminating the climate-tectonic imprints in morphotectonic records that are prevalent in current research. We should note that the paper published by Kothyari et al. (2017) was reviewed by national/international reviewers. We would like to emphasize the fact that the paper does not rule out the role of climate. However, most importantly, it presents significant features and observations that collection/assemblage points toward the dominant role of tectonics in their shaping, and not solely climate, as postulated by Rana and Sharma (2017). The objective of this paper is to identify tectonic signatures (geomorphology) in a monsoon - dominated, tectonically active terrain like the North Almora Thrust (NAT). These faults are marked by previous workers based on field evidence such as folding and faulting of lithological units; presence of slickensides parallel to the fault; offset of NAT owing to a transverse fault; and offset of drainage, drainage basin analysis, strath terraces, fluviolacustrine terraces, development of scarp, narrow river course, and deeply incised valleys. However, we disagree with the comments raised by Rana and Sharma (2017), because they are highly skewed toward the climate school of thought, and did not perceive the setting as a collection of landforms. Instead, they attempted to view them in isolation. Because these comments are important, we will try to further our research incorporating issues related to isolation of climate and tectonics imprints in the immediate future. We would like to thank Rana and Sharma (2017) for raising some basic questions on our work as this gave us an excellent opportunity to summarize and present the dominance of various processes and related landforms as earlier reported by Kothyari et al. (2017). A point-by-point detailed rebuttal/explanation of their queries is provided below.