I have read through both the revised manuscript and the author’s response to the comments of the 3 reviewers. It is clear that the author has attempted to address the concerns raised by the review process. Having said that, I am concerned that there are places where the discussion presented goes into areas that are quite distant from the results presented in the paper and becomes too speculative to be useful. The worst example of this is section 4.2 on “Climatic Influences”, which is not at all convincing and which would best be removed from the paper altogether.

Overall, I have the feeling that, in responding to the comments of the reviewers, the author has shifted the focus of the paper away from a discussion of the utility of animated sequences of satellite images as a tool for revealing patterns of glacier change over time, and onto an attempt to make bigger statements about the glaciology of the Karakoram. I think this works to the detriment of the paper because the larger scale discussion is highly dependent on other literature, rather than on results presented for the first time here, and the focus on the utility of the tool being discussed is lost.

As a result I would like to see a further round of revision that brings the focus of the paper clearly back onto the discussion of the glaciological insights that can be derived from animated imagery. I think the best way to do this is to identify a series of processes that the animated imagery captures especially well, to provide examples of each, and to explain exactly what information has been derived from the animations that could not have been extracted from successive examination of individual images or image differencing. This will result in a shorter paper that uses Karakoram examples to make points that have widespread and general significance – and will ensure that these points do not get lost in the details of regional discussion.

Section 3.6: The title “Movement of stable terrain” is a contradiction in terms. The real issue here is that it is common in studies like this to apply motion detection algorithms to areas of bedrock (which is assumed to not be moving) in order to set limits on the reliability of the velocities derived from image correlation methods – this approach clearly breaks down if the assumption that the bedrock is stable is in fact false (as it may well be, on occasions, in high relief, tectonically-active regions like the Karakoram). The point that differences in the DEMs used to orthorectify successive images in an animation may result in false apparent motion of bedrock and that this will undermine the validity of the approach described above is well made and significant, but the section as a whole needs rewriting to ensure that these concerns come across clearly.

I had quite a lot of detailed edits to suggest, but think this is probably not the time to bring them up as they would distract from addressing the bigger issues and might well prove to be unnecessary in the revised manuscript.

I thank the author for the time and care he has invested in revising and reshaping the paper. I believe that, in its current form it is an interesting and valuable contribution to the literature. I also think that there will be great interest in the animations that accompany it in particular because of their pedagogic value. I am therefore happy to recommend publication of the paper.