Seems a reasonable theory to me that a big impact would set off volcanic eruptions—especially when you hear the geologists talk about an earth quake in one part of the globe tends to ring the crust like a bell and thereby set off earthquakes in other parts of crustal plates.
It wasn’t clear to me. Were you guys arguing that impacts and eruptions were discreet events or that its reasonable that there might be a cause and effect in the case of the big impacts.
The point is, the “gradual extinction” idea (which is inherently ridiculous) got pantsed by the emergence of the Alvarez model; that model was based on actual evidence — the iridium spike in the narrow band between two paleontological layers — and the actual impact site didn’t need to be found. Oddly, the impact crater was identified in 1960, long before there *was* an Alvarez model.
Anyway, the gradualists rejected the idea outright — I’ve got a book I picked off a remainder table that purported to prove that the sudden extinction (the only kind that there is, logically, btw) was impossible, and that the impact model in particular was impossible.
The volcano “rock people” wanted in on the act, their field having been given swirlies by the Apollo landings — the lunar landscape is completely of impact origin. One of these guys, nearing the end of his career, fought tooth and nail against the Alvarez model, published papers which were shown to be not up to rigorous academic standards, and was shown the door. It seems not unlikely that other less senior academics at his employer were not all broken up about his sudden retirement. Anyway, he actually started a website to peddle his views, and on there claimed that Luis Alvarez had threatened him, and led to his nervous breakdown and early retirement.
There’s been a substantial contraction of the length of time the Deccan Traps are said to have been erupting; the idea is, in the past, millions of years of eruptions had the usual influence, meaning, local effects, slow continual accumulation of strata, no worldwide issues. In response to the slam-bang Great Dying that killed the dinosauria within days, weeks, or months, the length of time for the Deccan Traps’ eruptions had to be shrunk, which allowed amplification of their impact on worldwide climate, flora, and fauna, and restoration of a nice clean Darwinian uniformitarian gradual extinction.