Noah’s Ark Found!

Noah’s Ark has been found.  In fact it has been found on many occasions and in a variety of locations.  Most excitingly, Robert Ballard—the famed undersea explorer who tirelessly sought and eventually discovered the wreckage of the Titanic—is scheduled to discover the Ark again at the bottom of the Black Sea sometime within the next year or so.  At least that is what many hopeful observers are claiming.

To date, here are a few of the places where the Ark has been discovered: Mount Ararat (Turkey), Mount Suleiman (Iran), Mount Judi (Turkey), Sabalan Peak (Iran), an undisclosed location in Iran’s Elburz mountain range, and so on.

Here are a few pictures of the ark that may surface if you search the internet:

Robert Ballard, along with a host of other folks, is convinced that a catastrophic flood occurred sometime near 5000 BCE.   This particular flood crashed through the land mass separating the Black Sea (then a freshwater lake) from the Mediterranean Ocean.  In this scenario, the Black Sea became part of the ocean and a land mass something near 58,000 square miles in size (the equivalent of Illinois) flooded in a sweeping catastrophic event.  Clearly, from the perspective of the people living there at that time, this would have been seen as the whole earth flooding. This seems to match the time frame in which a host of cultures developed the story of a world-engulfing flood.  The same story expressed in the Biblical account of Noah.

The flooding in this scenario would have been triggered by rising seas as a result of the end of the last ice age which saw glaciers receding about 12,000 years ago.  The flood itself would have occurred 7,000 years ago.  Some geologists see evidence that the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea did at some point join together, though there is no clear consensus on the abruptness of the event.  Interestingly, Robert Ballard never really says that he is looking for Noah’s Ark as he now explores the depths of the Black Sea for evidence.  He says only that he is looking for evidence that a flood occurred.  Generally, the media types interviewing Mr. Ballard are the ones suggesting that he is looking for the ark.

Ballard has, in fact, found artifacts dating back 7000 years at the depths of the Black Sea. 

Stories about an ancient and catastrophic deluge persist in most cultures.  There seems some evidence of such flooding in various places around the world.  My house, in fact, sits atop a diluvial plain formed by a 10,000 year-old flood that saw lovely stones, gold, and sapphires washed down from the mountains all around me.  Additionally, some 12,000 years ago, much of western Montana lay beneath water nearly 2,000 feet deep—Glacial Lake Missoula—formed at the close of the last ice age when ice dammed the Clark Fork River just as it entered what is now Idaho.  The dam reached a height of over 2,000 feet and eventually ruptured to create a flood that changed the landscapes downstream and carried some boulders as big as cars (caught in ice rafts) 500 miles before depositing them in otherwise open places.        

The Ark?

That is another single beast yet to be saved from a flood of speculation.     

--Mitchell Hegman