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.
Q. What's harder than getting a pregnant brontosaurus in the ark?
A. Getting a brontosaurus pregnant in the ark!
It's more like you don't have the knowledge to construct a remotely plausible model. However, if it's any consolation, there's no reason to think that such should be possible at any level of knowledge.
Every YEC model I've ever seen ignores away features of the real world which are better answered by a straightforward Occam's Razor approach. That is, the world looks old because IT IS old, we don't see the sediments of a world-wide flood because there WASN'T one, and we find evidence for common descent of organisms because common descent IS the nature of the relationship.
Because it is true and accurate. How can people take seriously the notion that we are all descended from primeval slime by way of the monkeys?
Abundant physical evidence.
Your failure to address a single one of the points I made, other than with a repeat of your original unevidenced assertion, is noted.
You need to thank the undercover workers from Darwin Central, those who bring dishonor and discredit to the opposition by posing as boobs.
Okay, looking at you, I can see the resemblance.
So was that a simulated olive branch with leaves that the dove returned with in her mouth? Maybe one of those nice plastic ones you can by at the Arts and Crafts store?
The sediments are the sedimentary rock layers all over the world.
The Evolution model requires various high lying areas like Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Africa, etc. (1 mile above sea level) to be covered in "shallow seas" in order to lay down the expansively enormous and deep sedementary layers that are readily apparent to the naked eye (Grand Canyon, Badlands, Great Rift Valley, Sideling Hill Cut, etc.).
There is another name for highlands being covered in shallow seas - Noah's Flood. Evolutionists just aren't honest enough to admit that their model requires the same sort of widespread flooding that the Biblical Noah account does.
ALL of them? There are all kinds of non-flood sediments. There's the normal slow accumulation of silt in swamplands. There is windblown dust and sand. There is slow silting of lake and sea bottoms. Many of these types of sedimentation leave fossilized signatures of tranquil surface conditions which cannot occur in flood sediments.
Now, we do see flood sediments in the geologic column. They have a certain signature. Most of the geologic column in any given place tends to be non-flood. And the floods we do see are regional events only.
That's the For Dummies summary. For a more comprehensive list of what's wrong with your hopelessly naive formulation, peruse Flood Predictions.
Beats me, but they don't spend all day caring for them.
How many keepers would it need if *everything* had to be done by hand?
Um, just about everything is done by hand.
No fresh water in pipes. No automatic removal of waste.
Why not? It was raining, so the ark could have a plumbing system fed by rains to bring in fresh water and swab the decks.
No trucks to drive food around. Dumb waiters to bring up straw and such from the hold would work, along with hand carts.
Just the 20,000,000 species aboard
Not every species in the world was aboard, only those that could not survive a temporarily aquatic environment - land animals and birds.
And your space figure doesn't allow for storage space for fresh food
Would have been in the hold below the decks.
and water
It was raining. All the water needed was readily available.
And since you brought fish up did Noah carry the freshwater fish on the ark or the saltwater fish?
The Bible does not include any fish upon the ark. It might be readily supposed that the freshwater fish at that time could live in either environment, as Salmon do today.
but in that case how long would it have been until the land was fertile after the water receded
The land was apparently fertile soon after, as the dove came back with an olive branch.
Why did God hide all the physical evidence that this event ever happened
The sedimentary rock layers around the world, which evolutionists say were laid down at high elevations by shallow seas, seem like pretty good evidence to me of widespread flooding. Similarly, the congregations of animal bones in caves at high elevations are pretty good evidence to me.
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 fast breeding animals would have provided enough meat for the relatively few species of carnivores. However, perhaps what you say is a good explanation for why the carnivores like sabertooth tigers and the like went extinct at that time.
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,
There is nothing moronic about it. The event was not only to wipe out a sinful world, but to teach a symbol of the salvation now available by Baptism (the flood) in the one Church (the ark), where humanity is guided by the Dove (the Holy Spirit).
a way that just happens to match exactly the myths that you'd expect early hydraulic civilisations to tell.
So what sort of civilization then predicts the final destruction of the world as a conflagaration by fire?
How can people take this stuff seriously?
Because every people all the way around the world tells the same story??? Did they all make it up and coordinate it via telepathy? No, they clearly all experienced the trauma of the event.
300 cubits by 50 cubits @ 21" per cubit * 3 decks = ~138,000 sq. ft.
@ 15 cubits high = ~ 3,620,000 cu. ft.
One railway stock car = 10 ft. x 40 ft x 15 ft. = 6000 cu ft.
The Ark had a cubic space equal to 600 stock cars. Stock cars come with at least two decks to carry animals (unless they are small like chickens. Only two of every animal are needed. A typical stock car holds 240 sheep. If a sheep is the size of the average animal onboard, there was space for around 70,000 pairs of animals. Considering that there are only a few thousands species of birds, for example, and all are smaller than sheep, it seems as though all land animals could be readily accomodated, along with food.
First, the date of the global flood:
2252 BC -- layevangelism.com
2304 BC -- Answers in Genesis (+/- 11 years).
2350 BC -- Morris, H. Biblical Creationism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993.
Second, at that age we are not dealing with "sedimentary rock layers around the world." We are dealing with soils, common dirt.
Those soils contain a lot of evidence about what occurred while they were being laid down, starting with whether they was wind- or water-deposited.
The soils also contain a record of human occupation. That can be dated by multiple methods, including radiocarbon dating. That method has been shown to be quite accurate, and the claims made against it by young earthers have been shown to be inaccurate. Radiocarbon dating is supplemented by a variety of other methods.
In the western US, we have a continuous record of human occupation going back past 10,000 years. The faunal and floral record can be traced back much farther. There are no breaks in this record which would coincide with a global flood.
One telling piece of evidence is the mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA). There is a good record of Native American DNA from prior to 5,000 years, and after 4,000 years. The haplogroups and mutations match.
If there was a flood, then the groups in the western US would have been wiped out, and quickly replaced by other groups. The mtDNA would be distinctly different, before and after. This is not the case. The mtDNA can be traced from its origins in Africa to the New World, by multiple routes. There is no evidence at all that the entire sequence was terminated and replaced from a different source.
Now, there have been some good floods in the western US. The channeled scablands of eastern Washington state came from a series of late Ice Age floods. The boundaries of these events are known, as are the dates. They left a pretty clear signature in the soils. If a global flood had occurred, it would have left a huge signature in the soils, and the dullest of archaeological students would be able to see it. It would be in all the textbooks and in every back yard. There is no such evidence.
If you have any specific comments on this, please let me know. But don't bother with the creationist pages, as most of them are still hung up on fossils and the geological column, when what we are really dealing with are soils.
I don't know the size of a slave ship, but it probably wasn't bigger than a galleon, and it may have been much smaller. This slave ship could hold 600 slaves. The ark could hold 2,400 of them if it were four times as long. That's really packing them in, like the African captives. I don't know how Noah could have done it.
I think you are confusing flood sediments from a river, where there would obviously be current effects, with oceanic flooding, which would be much more like slow deposits. And as I pointed out, the evolutionist account also requires large seas spread over vast areas now 5000 ft. plus in evlevation to account for sedementary rock formation, so I fail to see how evolutionary theories of flooding upon the face of the earth really differ from the Genesis account other than in the timeframe.
I'm really not interested in debating you. You asked where all the record of flooing is and I said where to look.
The answers are in the Bible. If you don't want to believe the Bible, I'm certainly not going to convince you, and everywhere you look you will find reasons to doubt.
Your choice. Enjoy your secularist atheist alliance with Karl Marx and Co.
"Really, what is on Mt.Ararat that would be considered "classified"?"
Turkey is a NATO ally. It wouldn't look good for US spy photographs of Turkey to be released. If there is suppression, this is probably why.
The Evolution model requires various high lying areas like Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Africa, etc. (1 mile above sea level) to be covered in "shallow seas" in order to lay down the expansively enormous and deep sedementary layers that are readily apparent to the naked eye (Grand Canyon, Badlands, Great Rift Valley, Sideling Hill Cut, etc.).
For starters, it is geology, not evolution, which describes the layering of the geologic column. This is worth straightening out because many of you will say something like, "I love science, I just don't accept evolution." Then it turns out the speaker does not accept geology, astronomy, cosmology, nuclear chemistry, or anything else in science that is used to support an old Earth or an old universe.
Geology says that sedimentary layers do not get deposited on preexisting mountains. There is no way to do this and not just because it is impractical to cover the mountain with water. Even if you somehow deposit something on the mountain, it will just erode away. That's what mountains do. They wear down.
So you don't even understand what geology says about sediment layers on mountains. Well, sedimentary layers in mountains ARE the mountain. They used to lie flat and then they got warped. There are mountains that aren't sedimentary in character. They're called "volcanoes." They have a different structure entirely and they don't have any fossiliferous sediments on them. The sedimentary mountains are sediments to a great depth. When they were made, the layers crumpled both up AND DOWN. The lithosphere is thickened under mountains because the crushing displaces the warped crust in both directions. In fact, sort of like an iceberg, there's more below than above.
So you have two problems: 1) Your version is impossible, and 2) you have no understanding of the mainstream version.
See 258. You don't know what you are talking about.
I think you are confusing flood sediments from a river, where there would obviously be current effects, with oceanic flooding, which would be much more like slow deposits.
(Took that out of order, I know.) River floodplains are made of lots of little flood layers and you can tell it wasn't all one big flood. While I'm not familiar with "oceanic flooding," I have never seen a credible account of how it produces the geologic column.
I'm really not interested in debating you.
You're not interested in addressing the flood predictions versus reality problem. That doesn't give us much to discuss.
The answers are in the Bible.
I don't see it as that kind of a book.
Enjoy your secularist atheist alliance with Karl Marx and Co.
"Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home."
Civilization first begins to appear about 9-10,000 years ago if orthodox C14 dating is accepted. Human horticultural civilization has its origins in the Armenia-Assyria region that the flood posits as the landing of the Ark, and this also appears to approximate starting point for the spread of the Indo-European and Semitic language groups. Unsurprisingly, the first cities also appear in this region. The flood would have been some time before that 9-10,000 year mark.
I do not accept the chronologies of the Protestant Fundementalists like Morris. I'm a Catholic, not a Protestant fundementalist, and our perspective on these matters differs in a number of areas.
Please see: "The Science of Today and the Problems of Genesis" by Fr. O'Connell for a concise summary of the Catholic position.
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