Reply to: Comments on “Trace element and isotopic evidence for Archean basement in the Lonar crater impact breccia, Deccan volcanic province” by Ramananda Chakrabarti

Misra [1] has strong reservations on our finding of Archean crustal signatures in the Lonar crater impact breccia. Our inference was based on textural, mineralogical, trace element and Nd, Sr, Pb isotopic analyses of the target basalts and the impact breccia rocks of the crater [2], whereas Misra's arguments are based on the non-in situ nature of some of the impact breccia samples of the crater included in our study. It should be noted that he provided all the samples for our study that he also used in a recent study [3]. He now argues that some of the impact breccia samples of our study as well as his might be contaminated with “artificially made bricks”. This assessment, it should be noted, was neither mentioned to us when Misra provided the samples nor included in his recent paper [3] that he co-authored with S. Osae, C. Koeberl, D. Sengupta and S. Ghosh. We do not agree with Misra's interpretation that the geochemical data of the Lonar impact breccia were affected by anthropogenic contamination. To confirm our earlier conclusion, we provide additional Pb-isotopic data here from two new in situ impact breccia samples collected by one of us (Ghatak) in June 2006. The precise (GPS) locations of these samples (Fig. 1) along with their Pb-isotopic compositions are given in Table 1. The Earth and Planetary Science Letters 250 (2006) 669–670 www.elsevier.com/locate/epsl