Posted on 07/07/2006 10:05:17 PM PDT by freedom44
High in the mountains of northwestern Iran, a Christian archaeology expedition has discovered a rock formation that its members say resembles the fabled Noah's ark.
The team discovered the prominent boat-shaped rocks at just over 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range.
"It looks uncannily like wood," said Robert Cornuke, president of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute (BASE), the Palmer Lake, Colorado-based group that launched the expedition.
Photos taken by BASE members show a prow-shaped rock outcrop, which the team says resembles petrified wood, emerging from a ridge.
"We have had [cut] thin sections of the rock made, and we can see [wood] cell structures," Cornuke said.
Cornuke acknowledges that it may be hard to prove that this object was Noah's ark. But he says he is fairly convinced that the rock formation was an important place of pilgrimage in the past.
The BASE team has uncovered evidence of an ancient shrine near the outcrop, suggesting that this was an important place to people in the past, Cornuke says.
"We can't claim to have conclusively found the ark, but it does look like the object that the ancients talked about," Cornuke said.
Noah and the Flood
The story of Noah's ark is told in three major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
The Book of Genesis describes a great flood created by God "to destroy all life under the heavens."
But before the flood, God told Noah, one of his human followers, to build an ark and fill it with two of every species on the Earth.
But this location doesn't fit the description given in Genesis of the ark's passengers journeying from the east to arrive at Mesopotamia.
Cornuke and his team think that Mount Ararat might be a red herring.
"The Bible gives us a compass direction here, and it is not in the direction of Turkey. Instead it points directly towards Iran," Cornuke said.
Pilgrim Shrine?
Using the Book of Genesis and other literary sources, the BASE team journeyed to Iran in July 2005 to climb Mount Suleiman.
They chose Mount Suleiman after reading the notes of 19th-century British explorer A. H. McMahan.
In 1894, after climbing Mount Suleiman, McMahan wrote in his journal, "According to some, Noah's ark alighted here after the deluge."
McMahan also spoke of wood fragments from a shrine at the top of the mountain where unknown people had made pilgrimages to the site.
"We found a shrine and wood fragments at 15,000 feet [4,570 meters] elevation, as described by McMahan," Cornuke said.
Subsequent carbon dating of samples from the shrine showed the wood fragments from the site to be around 500 years old.
Lower on the mountain, expedition members came across the ark-like rock formation, which they estimate to be about 400 feet (122 meters) long.
Rocks From the Sea?
Not everyone is convinced by the BASE team's claims.
Kevin Pickering, a geologist at University College London who specializes in sedimentary rocks, doesn't think that the ark-like rocks are petrified wood.
"The photos appear to show iron-stained sedimentary rocks, probably thin beds of silicified sandstones and shales, which were most likely laid down in a marine environment a long time ago," he said.
Pickering thinks that the BASE team may have mistaken the thin layers in the sediment for wood grain and the more prominent layers as beams of wood.
"The wider layers in the rock are what we call bedding planes," he said.
"They show fracture patterns that we associate with … the Earth processes that caused the rocks to be uplifted to their present height."
The boat-shaped structure can also be explained geologically, says retired British geologist Ian West, who has studied Middle Eastern sediments.
"Iran is famous for its small folds, many of which are the oil traps. Their oval, ark-like shape is classical," he said.
Meanwhile, ancient timber specialist Martin Bridge, of England's Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory, is doubtful that a wooden structure would have lasted long enough to petrify under ordinary conditions.
"Wood will only survive for thousands of years if it is buried in very wet conditions or remains in an extremely arid environment," he said.
Bible scholars think that Noah built his ark somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, making preservation highly unlikely except in extreme environmental conditions.
And even if the wood had petrified, there seems to be little evidence of Noah's carpentry, according to Robert Spicer, a geologist at England's Open University who specializes in the study of petrification.
"What needs to be documented in this case are preserved, human-made joints, such as scarf, mortice and tenon, or even just pegged boards. I see none of this in the pictures. It's all very unconvincing," Spicer said.
Bridge, the Oxford timber specialist, points out that it would also be impossible for a boat to run aground at 13,000 feet.
"If you put all the water in the world together, melting both the ice caps and all the glaciers, you still wouldn't reach anywhere near the top of the mountain," he said.
The problem here is that this expedition's purpose was to find the Ark, and that they were trying to do so in an environment resembling a 3D rorschach test. And guess what they found...
If one looks hard enough for anything, they will find it regardless of whether it is really there.
Lucky!
I found reason and intellect during 12 years of Catholic education, we learned about evolution and that much of the bible is just stories, written to teach ignorant people, and that it is impossible to take it literally.
I also learned that if you out yourself as a Catholic here, people think you are going to hell and all that rubbish.
So, have a beer! Catholics are allowed to drink and have fun.
There may have been 12 arks....*shrug*...so what?
Explain away the fact that the flood mythos is universal...
Has is occured to you that there may very well be scientific fact behind the myth?
A near miss of a large spacial body?...the shifting of a tectonic plate?....the shifting of the magnetic poles?
An asteriod hit on an ocean?
One interesting theory is that a land bridge between the striaghts of gebralter collapsed in a massive earth quake and flood what is now the mediteranian sea...
There are documented cities on the bottom of the mediteranian...but then you allready knew that..
There are quite few scientific explainations that could displace a huge amount of water...
There are also several mythological possibilities...including the destruction of atlantis (if it ever existed)...
Just who is it that has the closed mind here?
;o)
LOL..kinda like being all threatend by Santa claus...when one claims not to believe in santa in the first place...
*snicker*
You hit on it, its a "myth"
Has it occured to you that you have no proof? Just a bunch of lame, unproven nonsense?
Its funny, you are big on completely unproved theories and such, but you probably don't embrace the theory of evolution which has a huge tested body of evidence and research. I have an open mind, but you are just throwing out garbage with no compelling proof, just your words. So, have you yet told me how the sloth, an arboreal dweller that can't function on land made it back to the amazon? Or how the lions and tigers and jaguars made it back to africa without any food? Or did they eat the Unicorns? I want you to explain how all the animals made it back home (hell, explain how all the animals made it the ark in the first place!). Oh, and the millions of species of bugs. Oh, and how all the fresh water fish survived being innundated by salt water, etc. etc.........
Keep believing fables, someone is profiting off of you for sure.
Please, answer my question, how did all the Australian and S. American animals make it home? How did the reptiles survive all the frozen mountain tops?
How did all the other animals eat? The top of that mountain didn't have the plant life necessary for any plains animals, and the carnivores surely couldn't live off the other animals, and even if they did, they would have made extinct all the other animals.
Please attempt to apply logic to your faith based beliefs.
There are so many basic "facts" about the story that just don't make sense--one couldn't fit all of the supposeldy surviving animals on a ship 450 feet long; how animals somehow got across oceans to get to the ark or be retrieved for passage on the ark; how EVERY animal that crawled on the land--including insects, reptiles, etc.--was somehow gathered and loaded on in the time specified; where'd the food for all these animals come from, again, on an ark of that size; how did Noah and his family handle taking care of that many animals for 40 days; considering how confident everyone here is about the impossibility of the planet Earth changing due to global warming in the course of hundreds of years (at minimum), we're supposed to just believe ALL of the planet was covered in water and then receded in 40 days? etc. etc. etc....
Religious faith is about faith, so whenever folks try to convince me of the "factual" basis of these things, they've lost already, by definition.
By the way, who in world are you to limit God? Are you suggesting the God is incapable of what is described about Noah's Ark in the Bible? Or, are you one of those genuises that has made the blindest leap of faith of all and tells himself that there is no God? Talk about clinging to fairy tale.
That's where people like us go wrong--trying to apply the logic which supposedly God gave us to stories which supposedly God gave us.
What a bunch of absolute hogwash. You can take 3 eye witnesses and get 3 different stories a day after they witnessed something. Now, ask their decendants hundreds and then thousands of years later what happened and you wonder why the stories aren't 100% alike? ROFL
Stop trying to apply logic to this story, people who think and use logic don't donate cash to the preacher in the hopes that they will go to heaven!
Besides, if you are truly brainwashed, you just ignore the facts and say "It's a Miracle!!!!"
Hmmm. By that reasoning, I guess next time you lose your keys, you better not go looking for them. After all, you starting your car up might be a figment of your active imagination. ;-)
Its amazing how limited YOUR thinking is. You place faith rather than actual thought in a fable. You spend all your energy trying to come up with exceptions and special rules to explain the universe rather than logic and reason.
Yeah a dog can smell a tumor, a fish can get jittery before an earthquake, that's nice, tell me how every species of animal traveled (some over 10,000 miles) to get into an ark, and more importantly, how did they get home? How did they eat? How did they not have chromosone damage from inbreeding?
You laughably say that perhaps the animals sensed a disaster and returned when it was over, well what did they eat? Where are the fossil records? How did they swim across the Atlantic and Pacific to get home with no food?
How can you pretend to be so open minded and be so ignorant on the simplest questions? You are waving your ignorance like a flag, its silly.
Oh, yeah, "Its a miracle", the ultimate cop-out for the lazy minded.
Oh--so after surviving this flood, the survivors simply forgot to write it down, and only later their descendents cobbled it together, which explains all the discrepancies...yet, you posted a chart "proving" the consistencies.
These folks simply sauntered away from the ark--having been the only survivors of the human race--and, well, they had lots of other things to worry about, so they didn't bother recording what happened, leaving that to others down the line to piece together from, uh, STORIES that came down from hundreds and then thousands of years--as you admit, in your own words.
So these stories--which could be about any flood, and don't include the very specific details in the Bible--somehow support the Bible story...but you yourself have admitted they're not consistent.
So the fact that the stories aren't consistent proves the Noah's Ark story is true; and the fact that the stories are NOT consistent ALSO proves the Noah's Ark story is true.
Talk about ROFL!
Wait, you mean God wants us to think and reason?
Wow!
I guess that makes sense, because we built an entire civilization didn't we?
But the Ark supporters want us not to think, not to reason, not to question a fable, so I guess they shouldn't be on the evil devil influenced internet, or living in a home, or having clothes on their back (except for the naughty bits). How dare we think! We all must stop thinking and move into a cave and not use brains!
Brains bad!
:O)
great analogy!
You said it all in two sentences.
I just love the folks who use "facts" to support faith... when the facts support that belief. And then when the "facts" don't fit (such as the wild inconsistencies in these "facts" from culture to culture), suddenly it's "well, it's about faith, it just IS, and God says so, so there!"
They'd do a lot better--and be more consistent--simply ignoring the facts and saying "Believe it or don't believe it, I believe it for one reason only--it's in a book someone told me was the word of God, and that someone wouldn't lie."
Meaning...it's about faith. Not facts.
I'm not sure I can answer exactly your questions, but perhaps
your assumption about the tops of the mountains being
frozen is not necessary. There could have been uplifting or
valleys formed after the flood. There is no specific height
given regarding the height of where the ark ended up.
Also, animals don't have to migrate at once to a far
away land. They may migrate over a few generations. Or there
could have been land mass movement, or tectonic plate
shifting. After all, don't many geologists believe in
Pangondwondea (spelling?) where most of the earths land
mass was once joined together. Suppose the ark was somewhere
in that area, some animals migrated to specific area more
suitable for themselves, and then the land split off?
I am not sure, but is that a possiblej scenario?
I am assuming that the humans on the ark were white, black, asian, polynesian, hispanic, mongolian, mestizo, nunavut, melanesian, etc....
Because they sired the entire planet.,
Oh, and don't mention the "E" word!
Still waiting to hear how the sloth and koala made it home and all the snakes, etc.
LOL
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