Reply to Discussion: The timing of gold mineralization across the eastern Yilgarn Craton using U–Pb geochronology of hydrothermal phosphate minerals

The presentation of recent geochronological work on orogenic gold deposits in the Eastern Goldfields of the Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia, claims to prove that there is a single broad event of gold mineralization and that structural work demonstrating that there are a number of discrete gold mineralization events is wrong. This new data demonstrates no such thing, as this data, no doubt the best that can currently be produced, shows a very wide and inconsistent range in ages. Geochronology is not yet able to reliably separate these events, which appear to be spread over an interval of perhaps 30 Ma, up to ∼2635 Ma.