Reply to the comments by Madsen & Liu on “Late quaternary OSL chronologies from the Qinghai Lake (NE Tibetan Plateau): Inter-comparison of quartz and K-feldspar ages to assess the pre-depositional bleaching”

In response to the comment of Madsen and Liu (2018), we explain why our quartz optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages showing the early MIS 3 lake highstand are robust. We also demonstrate that the difference in the age estimates between ours (Long et al., 2018) and other studies should be attributed to contrasting equivalent dose (De) values, rather than water contents (hence the dose rate) which was claimed by Madsen and Liu (2018).