Posted on 03/09/2006 11:30:41 PM PST by Tim Long
Digital image of 'Ararat Anomaly' has researchers taking closer look
A new, high-resolution digital image of what has become known as the "Ararat Anomaly" is reigniting interest in the hunt for Noah's Ark.
Satellite image of 'Ararat Anomaly,' taken by DigitalGlobe's QuickBird Satellite in 2003 and now made public for the first time (courtesy: DigitalGlobe)
The location of the anomaly on the northwest corner of Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey has been under investigation from afar by ark hunters for years, but it has remained unexplored, with the government of Turkey not granting any scientific expedition permission to explore on site.
But the detail revealed by the new photo from DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite has a man at the helm of the probe excited once again.
"I've got new found optimism ... as far as my continuing push to have the intelligence community declassify some of the more definitive-type imagery," Porcher Taylor, an associate professor in paralegal studies at the University of Richmond, told Space.com.
For more than three decades, Taylor has been a national security analyst, and has also served as a senior associate for five years at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
"I'm calling this my satellite archaeology project," Taylor said.
Space.com reports the project has been combining the photographic resources of QuickBird with GeoEye's Ikonos spacecraft, Canada's Radarsat 1, as well as declassified aerial and satellite images snapped by U.S. intelligence agencies.
While it's quite possible the item of interest could simply be a natural ridge of rock, snow and ice, Taylor says there's also a chance it could be something manmade.
"I had no preconceived notions or agendas when I began this in 1993 as to what I was looking for," he said. "I maintain that if it is the remains of something manmade and potentially nautical, then it's potentially something of biblical proportions."
The anomaly remains ensconced in glacial ice at an altitude of 15,300 feet, and Taylor says the photos suggest it's length-to-width ratio is close to 6:1, as indicated in the Book of Genesis.
The U.S. Air Force took the first photographs of the Mt. Ararat site in 1949. The images allegedly revealed what seemed to be a structure covered by ice, but were held for years in a confidential file labeled "Ararat Anomaly."
The new image was actually taken in 2003, but has never been revealed to the public until now.
Arking up the wrong tree?
Meanwhile, there are others who believe Noah's Ark has already been found, and tourists can actually visit it on a mountain next to Ararat.
Some believe this is Noah's Ark, already found on a mountain next to Mt. Ararat (courtesy: wyattmuseum.com)
The late Ron Wyatt, whose Tennessee-based foundation, Wyatt Archaeological Research, purported the ark has already been found at Dogubayazit, Turkey, some 12-15 miles from Ararat, noting Genesis states the ark rested "upon the mountains of Ararat," not mountain.
Is this a hair from a large cat aboard Noah's Ark? (photo: Richard Rives, wyattmuseum.com)
Wyatt's website is filled with on-location photographs and charts promoting its case with physical evidence including radar scans of bulkheads on the alleged vessel, deck timber and iron rivets, large "drogue" stones which are thought to have acted as types of anchors, and even some animal hair inside, possibly from a large cat like a lion or tiger.
A flood of doubt
However, there's been no shortage of critics from both scientific and Christian circles who think the Dogubayazit site is erroneous.
Lorence Collins, a retired geology professor from California State University, Northridge, joined the late David Fasold, a one-time proponent of the Wyatt site, in writing a scientific summary claiming the location is "bogus."
"Evidence from microscopic studies and photo analyses demonstrates that the supposed Ark near Dogubayazit is a completely natural rock formation," said the 1996 paper published in the Journal of Geoscience Education. "It cannot have been Noah's Ark nor even a man-made model. It is understandable why early investigators falsely identified it."
The Answers in Genesis website provides an in-depth report attempting to debunk any validity the Dogubayazit site has, and concludes by stating:
"[A]s Christians we need to always exercise due care when claims are made, no matter who makes them, and any claims must always be subjected to the most rigorous scientific scrutiny. If that had happened here, and particularly if the scientific surveys conducted by highly qualified professionals using sophisticated instruments had been more widely publicized and their results taken note of, then these claims would never have received the widespread credence that they have."
Officials with Wyatt Archaeological Research remain unfazed in the face of such criticism.
"The site ... is actually something that you can look at. Not some made up story that no one is quite able to reach but something that is really there," said president Richard Rives. "It is a 'boat-shaped object' composed of material containing organic carbon, which is what is found in petrified wood. ...
"While there is more research that needs to be done at the site, there is a substantial amount of evidence that would indicate that the Wyatt site is not a natural object. ...
"Today, everyone wants to tell us how to think. We, at Wyatt Archaeological Research, do not do that. We just present the evidence that we have and let each individual make his own decision."
In both the Old and New Testaments, the Bible speaks of Noah and the ark, and Jesus Christ and the apostles Paul and Peter all make reference to Noah's flood as an actual historical event.
'Noah's Ark' by Pennsylvania artist Edward Hicks, 1846
According to Genesis, Noah was a righteous man who was instructed by God to construct a large vessel to hold his family and many species of animals, as a massive deluge was coming to purify the world which had become corrupt.
Genesis 6:5 states: "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."
Noah was told by God to take aboard seven pairs of each of the "clean" animals – that is to say, those permissible to eat – and two each of the "unclean" variety. (Gen. 7:2)
Though the Bible says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, it also mentions "the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days."
The ark then "rested" upon the mountains of Ararat, but it was still months before Noah and his family – his wife, his three sons and the sons' wives – were able to leave the ark and begin replenishing the world.
The challenge to standard geochronology is that if mountains have been uplifting at current rates or even much slower, the lower parts of the geologic column which are many hundreds to thousands of millions of years old should have been uplifted and eroded away long ago. Yet these older sections are very well-represented in our mountain ranges, as cursory field study or examination of geologic maps will reveal.
Brother, maybe you should tone down that anger a notch or two. :)
The Iron Age is named after the period during which Iron became commonly smelted and extensively used. The name has zero to do with Daniel. It became long before Rome became a period probably beginning with the Hittites as a major force in world history.
Remember "In Search Of" with Leonard Nimoy? They
did a great documentary on the Ark. I miss that show.
Sounds like a great topic to begin a new season, "In search of, in search of".
Re: "Babara Eden as 'Jeanie'"
And I might add... must have a belly button sighting to go with.
Sorry, that is not wher it came from.
It came from when certain nations ruled in power and the time periods from then
And that came from Daniel
Iron is older than than those time periods in history, but wwe dont call those earlier periods the IRON age, nor do we change Bronze or Iron around in those time periods when they were used at the same time.
I don't have a clue either. Perhaps he will be kind enough to enlighten us with more information?
Carolyn
I don't think fear of comets was anything irrational. I think it was grounded in experience. See The Cosmic Serpent. As far as where all the water came from: there are still several times more water trapped in the crust than in the oceans and seas at present. As far as what is a cubit, etc., Fasold explores that and other questions you raised.
The most common usage of iron age in science - and therefore, in archeology - refers to the system of the three-ages , introduced in the 1820s. It's neither based on the Ages of Men of the Greek mythology nor the Book of Daniel.
I've seen that. I suspect some of your YECish don't like it because there are then no mountains for the rising flood to cover, which makes it un-literal. That's obviously not my objection, so I'll mention it only in passing.
All the mountains on Earth should be about the same age by your model, which is basically younger than springtime. Younger, that is, than even the youngest mountains we have, the still-growing Himalayas. There should be no old, rounded mountains like my Appalachians, which are among the world's oldest. You can't find a dinosaur bone where I live. The mountains were raised and eroding away when the dinosaurs were here, so all the dinosaurs that ever died here--and there figure to have been plenty--washed away downhill.
Nothing here post-dates a thing called the "Alleghenian Orogeny," the tectonic disturbance that crumpled the once-flat sediments into mountains. It was a collision with what is now North Africa which put the last piece in place to form the global continent Pangaea.
In the Himalayas, you can find fossils of mammals from as little as 50 million years ago, their bones preserved from the sediments along the shores of what was then the Tethys Sea which separated Southern Asia from the approaching sub-continent of India. Here, you can find a trilobite if you're lucky, but you have no hope of ever seeing a mammal or a dinosaur. Maybe an early synapsid reptile is possible.
If you're using a Walt Brown-type model for post-flood continental drift, the energies involved would have melted the crust. Even at lesser speeds, the catastrophes involved would have merited as much ink in Genesis as the flood itself rather than being unmentioned.
Clearly, nothing like that ever happened.
Iron age is a phrase of archaeological convenience, not something that denotes when the metal was actually first worked.
Genesis 4.22 reads: "Tubalcain, who was a hammerer and artificier in every work of brass and iron."
Actually, the cubit used was probably somewhat larger than 18", more like the 21" egyptian cubit, and the boat likely had many decks. The Babylonians report 6 decks in the Epic of Gilgamesh. That would be 6.3 acres of space.
How much space does it take to pen up Zoo animals for the winter? Not that much. Our Philadelphia Zoo is just 42 acres total, and most of that space is walking paths, water, summer grazing habitats, and the like, not animal enclosures. The non-hibernating animals would have required some food of course, but again, 6 acres is a lot of space for pens and food stores, and some of the food would have been produced by other animal's natural reproduction (i.e. bird eggs, fast-breeding mice and rats and rabbits, while fish could of course be caught off the side or back of the boat, etc.).
I think the problem is exaggerated.
LOL! Thanks for that!
"you shall make it with lower, second, and third decks. - Genesis 6:16
One man who has claimed to have seen the ark broken in half said he saw ovens and cages inside. I thought that was pretty interesting.
TS
Shel Silverstein, by way of the Irish Rovers
How many keepers does the Philadelphia Zoo need to look after the few-hundred resident species? How many keepers would it need if *everything* had to be done by hand? No fresh water in pipes. No automatic removal of waste. No trucks to drive food around. No vetinerary servies on call. No artificial lighting. Just the 20,000,000 species aboard (try packing that into 6 acres, or even 600 acres. IIRC the bible specifies 3 decks not 6. And your space figure doesn't allow for storage space for fresh food and water, and for the internal bracing in such a craft that would probably require about 30% of the internal volume. The 8 people would get a few seconds per species in the entire year to look after them. Numerous species have special dietary requirements, temperature requirements, humidity requirements... And since you brought fish up did Noah carry the freshwater fish on the ark or the saltwater fish? He had to carry one or the other. Some of the saltwater fish require enormous pressures to survive, so maybe the flood was salty and Noah carried the freshwater fish, but in that case how long would it have been until the land was fertile after the water receded? Why did God hide all the physical evidence that this event ever happened, yet permit a book describing it to continue to exist? Once the animals landed every predation event for the first few months would represent an extinction, and carnivores need lots of prey to eat. The list of rational objections just goes on and on; all I've done there is summarise a small number of the most obvious. And all this so that God (an infinitely powerful being) could kill everyone-8 in the world in a moronic way that required millions of miracles, a way that just happens to match exactly the myths that you'd expect early hydraulic civilisations to tell. How can people take this stuff seriously?
"I've seen that. I suspect some of your YECish don't like it because there are then no mountains for the rising flood to cover, which makes it un-literal. That's obviously not my objection, so I'll mention it only in passing."
As a nitpick, you are confusing literalism (and actually, literalism isn't really the correct term either) with inerrantism. I am not a strict inerrantist -- I wouldn't view a few mountains here and there not being covered by the flood as surprising. However, I don't think that they existed, at least to the heights they are now.
"If you're using a Walt Brown-type model for post-flood continental drift, the energies involved would have melted the crust. Even at lesser speeds, the catastrophes involved would have merited as much ink in Genesis as the flood itself rather than being unmentioned.
Clearly, nothing like that ever happened."
What is clear to me is that we don't have all the knowledge needed to construct a complete model. That's not really surprising, nor does it cause the model to fail in light of the confirming field evidence and the nearly universal historical evidence.
Dolt! There were no living plants left, so the herbivorous dinosaurs died rather soon (yes, they went extinct), and the carnivorous beasts (lions, etc.) fed off their carcasses. The horses, cows and such continued to live off of what was stored on the ark. That kept them alive until plants returned, and then all went back to normal. Why can't you satanic science guys understand?
</creationism mode>
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