Reply to comment by Elizabeth S. Cochran and John E. Vidale on 'Tidal synchronicity of the 26 December 2004 Sumatran earthquake and its aftershock'

We are grateful to Cochran and Vidale for their Comment which has stimulated us to clarify and reflect further upon the periodic relationships observed, as well as to elaborate upon various matters that stemmed from a combination of our own understatement and the way we handled the constraints of brevity in relation to our unexpected findings. Nevertheless, their respected Comment appears to us to be often inappropriate. In part or whole, the Comment does not appear to us to be either sufficiently convincing or powerful to invalidate either the methods or the conclusions of our paper, i.e. that the timing of the major earthquakes during the ten-month period for the study region does correlate with the lunar/tidal cycles. These conclusions are now further supported by our most recent and extended analysis, as reported here.