0169-555X/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2009.12.008 Andre Pugin's name does not appear on this reply because there was a delay in our receiving the comment, and we responded to a tight deadline. Unfortunately, this left insufficient time for an internal review required by the Geological Survey of Canada before Andre could be an author. We expected that therewould be a reaction to our paper and serious questions. After all, we applied controversial ideas to a part of the globe for which we have no first-hand experience. Indeed, the observations of King et al. (2009) on lineations beneath the Rutford Ice Stream do present a serious challenge to the megaflood hypothesis. Otherwise, our proposals for the formation of subglacial bedforms stand up well to the criticism by Cofaigh et al. They agree with us that meltwater action was significant to seascape evolution in Antarctic shelf-crossing troughs and, in this respect, we gave full credit to their research in many citations. However, in contrast to our megaflood hypothesis, minimal meltwater supply and transfer were central to many earlier models of meltwater in troughs. Since the volumes of running water in minimal models are negligible (Shaw et al., Fig. 6), meltwater in these models could have contributed little to seascape evolution. Much of this reply concerns questions that have been asked repeatedly over the last twenty years, especially those concerning a meltwater origin for drumlins. We respond emphatically to these questions, which have become less, not more, discerning with time. This reply follows the order of the comment and, in places, simply responds to a particular comment. Why is it more important that shelf-crossing troughs would have been the preferred routes for ice streams? Surely this assertion prejudges the relative importance of ice streams and meltwater in the formation of bedforms.