Could they both be right?
The above link was posted in a thread stating that earthquakes on one side of the planet could trigger earthquakes on the other side: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3677932/posts
A Chicxulub-sized event rings the planet like a bell, any fault that is near its critical strain is apt to let loose.
Doctors and coroners have a term, coup contercoup, that means damage to the opposite side of the brain from where the skull was struck.
Imagine you are standing on the spot exactly on the opposite side from the strike. The shock waves race around the globe and come together (focus, if you will) right under your feet!
On a lower gravity bodies such as the moon, big impacts have delivered sufficient coup countercoup force to jet material off into space.
I don’t doubt that nearby magma would be squirted up through the resulting shattered bedrock.
Add to that the fact that Chicxulub was a shallow water strike and the surrounding sea formed a wall around the white hot crater as it attempted to flood in. It was like a 120 mile wide rocket nozzle jetting vaporized seawater and any entrained atmosphere into space. As the crater was quenched, the force of the boiling reduced, and the remaining flood of sea water and air steam-cleaned half the planet.
It was a bad day.
On land nothing larger than a house cat survived. I suspect all the surviving animals were burrow dwellers, animals already used to breathing lower oxygen content than their larger peers. The thinned atmosphere was a final insult to the bigger surface dwellers.
From the Berkeley News article:
Richards teamed up with experts in many areas to try to discover faults with his radical idea that the impact triggered the Deccan eruptions, but instead came up with supporting evidence. Paul Renne, a professor in residence in the UC Berkeley Department of Earth and Planetary Science and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, re-dated the asteroid impact and mass extinction two years ago and found them essentially simultaneous, but also within approximately 100,000 years of the largest Deccan eruptions, referred to as the Wai subgroup flows, which produced about 70 percent of the lavas that now stretch across the Indian subcontinent from Mumbai to Kolkata.
...Co-authors of the paper, in addition to Richards, Renne, Manga and Sprain, are Walter Alvarez, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of earth and planetary science and the co-originator of the dinosaur-killing asteroid theory...
From The Atlantic article
Over and over, Keller saw “no evidence of a sudden mass killing.” Instead, she found more proof that the Earth’s fauna grew progressively more distressed starting 300,000 years before the extinction. The forams, for example, gradually shrank, declined in number, and showed less diversity, until only a handful of species remained—results consistent with what many paleontologists have observed for animals on land during the same time.
...Alvarez had set the tone. His numerous scientific exploits—winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, flying alongside the crew that bombed Hiroshima, “X-raying” Egypt’s pyramids in search of secret chambers—had earned him renown far beyond academia
NB: Walter Alvarez is the son of Luis Walter Alvarez the Nobel Physicist, that has done it all, including early work on the K-T Boundry with his son.
Also, note the minor(?) difference of 200k years between the two camps?