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.
"Use the brain God gave you, not using it would be a sin."
I used the brain God gave me to arrive at the belief that He exists. I thought like you do now when I was 14. Your big, tough unrelenting questions ARE YOUR DEFENSE AGAINST EVER BELIEVING.
The nature of God is unknowable. There MUST ALWAYS be more questions than answers Anyone who doesn't want to be bothered by God can simply ask questions and wait for someone to answer them.
Use your brain to LOOK for Him. It stands to reason that if He exists he COULD NOT leave you, in life, incapable of finding Him.
"I *have* thought about the mechanics and devastation associated by the transport of this volume of water."
This very subject was covered on History, TLC or Discovery. A scientist (Geologist?) posited the mechanics and made predictions on among other thing, the geological scar that would be left. The special claimed he found corrosponding geology. Sorry I don't remember which channel but a look at their shows for sale on DVD might turn it up. "
They followed the Kangaros (/sarcasm)
That is actually a better answer than any ark supporters can give.
LOL
No, my big tough unrelenting questions are exposing this as a fable because you can't answer them. You can't go saying that this event happened as a historical event on one hand, and then retreat into it being a metaphysical event when challenged. You can't have it both ways.
But, maybe if you try typing in all caps, I'll change my mind.
LOL
The sloth didn't have to make it back to Australia. The known "world" was a lot smaller back then - THEIR whole world was flooded, but it doesn't mean that Australia and South America were
Don't know, literalists say it was entire planet and every single species of animal. If it was just a small part of world, wouldn't we know that from later stories?
I don't believe that parables happened historically. Do I believe a guy lived in a whale's mouth? No, and I don't believe in the ark story. They were parables, just stories.
Couple of considerations:
- Jesus referred to the flood in the context of judgment. If we hold that the flood was myth or fable, then we imply Jesus was lying or was misinformed--neither trait one we associate with lord and savior
- God's promise to Noah was that He would never again flood the earth the way He did. However, there HAVE been local floods since that time. So, if the flood of Noah was merely a local flood, then God was lying.
- I'm not trying to impute motives on your part, but I will say that often people dislike, or try to disprove the idea of the Noahic flood, because they are uncomfortable with the idea of divine judgment.
No, it wasn't God who wrote Genesis, some say it was Moses putting to paper what had long been an oral tradition in pakistani/hebrew culture. A true story of survival at sea during a hurricane was turned into a myth/fish story that gets bigger with each telling. It's really no different than other myths : greek gods, aryan superiority, the list goes on and on; even today we have the myth of OBL living in a cave, sending out his assassins, a medieval arabic myth. Don't underestimate the POWER of myth, it is MYTHS that underpin religions. It was a MYTH that impelled the 9/11 hijackers to kill so many.....As to Jesus and floods : his main clue : "and the lightning flashed from the east even unto the west". Put that(counter EMF force) together with the GREAT earthquake and HUGE hailstones...and you've got what I figured out in 1979.
Sorry, you flunked the infinite watermelon test....
You have a time-line problem here. Pangaea was some 500 million years ago, noah was about 7000 years ago. His culture was dravidian, remnants of which still live on in india. Gondwanaland(the southern supercontinent) developed marsupials(kangaroos)and fossil marsupials are found in south america. The BIG dinosaurs went extinct with the Yucatan meteorite/nuclear winter event of 65 million years ago, thus the rise of mammals. But when pangaea split they developed in different directions. There NEVER was marsupials on the eurasian continent, but noah was clearly a pakistani living in the delta region of the Indus River. Do some research...
Follow the links in poast 312.
In the 1930s Himmler sent a group of scientists to Tibet to discover the origins of aryans, to buttress his case for aryan superiority. Here in 2006 we have the same type of fools crawling all over Mt Ararat looking for a myth that was cooked up around a campfire in iraq 7000 years ago....You see, OBL and the 9/11 terrorists were living out a MYTH. Myths are powerful things, the underpinnings of religions. Tell a homely girl she's beautiful. She knows it's a lie but still loves the lie(bogus bill clinton knows this only too well). Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the easter bunny, mind-numbed robots pulling the slot machine lever in Vegas, the little old lady buying her daily lottery ticket.....myths are powerful things. We would do better by attacking islamic myths than whacking al queda types in iraq; and, although it would dis-comfit christians, jews as well, exposing the noah MYTH to scientific scrutiny would put islam into doubt as well : childish belief vs adult certainty....This then is your study for next semester : the POWER OF MYTH.
Nuke Mecca.
Yeah it's been suggested already. That may be why we haven't been nuced already. MAD = Mutually Assured Destruction works with islamofascists just as well as the former soviet politbureau. Still, though, stock up on survival supplies, iran and north korea may be on GWBs dance card soon enough.
Why must the Noahic flood be myth? Not to be facetious, but I hardly expect that anyone who could raise Jesus from the dead would have trouble creating a worldwide flood. As I said before, Jesus had no trouble either with the idea of a worldwide flood or with Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, so why should we?
Jesus was raised from the dead by placing a su-co ring around his corpse, and slam freezing it to 0 deg Kelvin. By the First Law of Thermodynamics the heat in his body had to GO somewhere, thus the up/down gamma ray burst that burned the scorch-picture onto the shroud of turin. There is still residual gyroscopic precessions, thus it was small cones of radiation that went into the +z/-z vectors(ring defines x-y plan). Thus the sharp image on tip of nose and fuzzier further away.....Then his body is returned to the cat scan image taken during the transfiguation on the mount years earlier, including his brain memory. Thus, at first, he doesn't recognize mary, calling her "woman", because his brain memory hasn't caught up to his spirit memory yet....As to the world wide flood : no evidence whatsoever. It's all just a pakistani farmer on his log raft out in the middle of the gulf of arabia. The earth is CURVED, remember? After generations of oral tradition by illiterate people it gets jazzed up into a MYTH and finally written down by moses as if it was all true.....You have to graduate from sunday school pilgrim, it's a real world out here, not for gullible 5 year olds....
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