Noah’s Ark Found!!

[ideologyhunter]

So, if I'm getting this, someone thinks that two of us, or who knows, fourteen of us, traveled to ancient Palestine to get on a boat?
Yeah, nah. I think I can speak for the Australian Koala Community and say that none of us ever did such a deed.
What, jump in the ocean, swim to Indonesia, island hop to the Malay Peninsula, ramble through jungles to the Indian flatlands, struggle through the mountains, take the Khyber Pass over to the dusty rocks of the Mideast...eating what, exactly? Stopping at eucalyptus cafes? Does that sound to you like koalas??
No damn koala ever did such. We sleep 20 hours a day, awright? Not to mention that some fuckwit would've had to come to our tree houses and tell us the deal in the first place.
So, yeah nah. Tell your story but leave us out of it. It's too lame-o for words, and I'm getting sleepy even talking about it. Just say that the koalas self-inflated on eucalyptus farts and floated above our homeland. Makes just as much sense. I'm done. Not here to fuck spiders.
Matilda
AKC secretary

 

[WAB]

Everyone knows that koalas are actually muppets. Frank Oz? Frank OZ!? Oh, come on!

 

[hyzer]

Excellent article at Archaeology Review

Noah’s Ark is the Herpes of Pseudoarchaeology​

"Noah’s Ark has possibly been “discovered” more times than any other artifact or feature mentioned in the Bible. Just when you think news of Ark discovery is in a dormant state, it emerges like a rash to be scratched until it fades away. And, like herpes, no amount of inoculation of fact or reason will make it go away for good."

It then goes on to list 18 different times it has been "found". Followed by excellent paragraphs summarizing why it is impossible. And a thorough review of what they are doing now and why it is a scam.

 

[steve_bank]

An oldie but a goodie. Numerous TV shows on it in the past.

Scroll down to a list of books, films, and TV shows. As I remember it it was claimed Turkey would not allow anyone to go to the site.

I vaguely remember clams that a local actually saw the structure.

Ararat anomaly - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Ararat anomaly is an alleged structure appearing on photographs of the snowfields near the summit of Mount Ararat, Turkey, and advanced by some Christian believers as the remains of Noah's Ark.[1][2]

The Ararat anomaly is an alleged structure appearing on photographs of the snowfields near the summit of Mount Ararat, Turkey, and advanced by some Christian believers as the remains of Noah's Ark.[1][2]

Location

The anomaly is located on the northwest corner of the Western Plateau of Mount Ararat (approximately 39°42′40″N 44°17′59″E) at about 15,500 ft (4,724 m), some 2.2 km (1.4 mi) west of the 16,854 ft (5,137 m) summit, on the edge of what appears from the photographs to be a steep downward slope.

History of existing imagery

It was first filmed during a U.S. Air Force aerial reconnaissance mission in 1949 - the Ararat massif sits on the former Turkish / Soviet border, and was thus an area of military interest - and was accordingly given a classification of "secret" as were subsequent photographs taken in 1956, 1973, 1976, 1990, and 1992, by aircraft and satellites.

Six frames from the 1949 footage were released under the Freedom of Information Act to Porcher Taylor, a professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, and a scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies specializing in satellite intelligence and diplomacy, in 1995.

A joint research project was later established between Insight Magazine and Space Imaging (now GeoEye), using the IKONOS satellite. IKONOS captured the anomaly on 5 August and 13 September 2000. GeoEye has constructed a computerized video of the imagery it captured of the anomaly. The structure appears at approximately halfway through the video. A controversial "bird's eye view" satellite image, taken by IKONOS later in 2003 for the same research project, was released to the public in 2006.

The Mount Ararat area also has been imaged by France's SPOT satellite in September 1989, Landsat in the 1970s and NASA's Space Shuttle in 1994, as well as military satellite images captured by the CIA's KH-9 (Keyhole 9) in 1973 and KH-11 (Keyhole 11) in 1976 and 1990–1992.

 

[bilby]

I always forget that we'd also expect to find evidence of a global flood in all caves around the world. Which we don't. But I like to go with the existence of freshwater lakes, which conclusively disproves a global flood too.

I like to wonder how Australian Aborigines managed to keep painting rockwalls in a continuous and distinctive style, despite all of them being drowned in the flood and replaced with descendants of Noah's family, none of whom had previously expressed any interest in, or even knowledge of, Australia or its indigenous people and their art.

Perhaps Ham toured Australia in his gap year, before dad built his boat, and brought back a pair of koalas and a pair of echidnas, and a pair of wombats, and a pair of kangaroos, and a pair of ... hang on, just how big were suitcases back in those days?

I would have paid good money to see him capture and bring back to the Middle East the two saltwater crocodiles.

 

[WAB]

And you thought the Flood was mean? I don't know what this guy did to piss God off, but...

MSN

 

[Tigers!]

I was responding to the comment that says that there is not enough water to cover all the land on earth. There is more than enough water to cover the earth provided certain conditions are met.

An atomically perfect sphere would require only a minuscule amount of water to cover it totally. But as that's not the event that we are discussing, why bring it up?

Are we going to also debate the properties of seven pairs of spherical cows in a vacuum?

I've not heard of that one before.

 

[steve_bank]

Enoch water to cover the Earth?

The Cascade Range, Rocky Mountains, and Himalayas? Ararat is abo0ut 17,000 feeet. Bible said it rained 24/7 for 40 dasys. Oecan cacute liers per minute for the volume of water.

A Jew on the fiorm said 40 meant a while. It rained for 40 days. Jesus wandered in desert for 40 days. Jews wandered in desert for 40 years.

Significance of the Number 40 in Jewish Tradition

In Jewish thought, the number 40 is a recurring symbol of transformation, testing, and the completion of a major life or spiritual stage. It appears frequently in the Torah and Talmud, often marking periods of change, purification, or divine intervention J

Key biblical and rabbinic examples

40 days of rain during the Great Flood (Genesis 7:4, 12, 17) — symbolically reversing the corruption of creation

40 days Moses spent on Mount Sinai receiving the Torah (Exodus 24:18) — a period of divine revelation and transformation

40 years Israel wandered in the desert — a generational cycle of testing and spiritual maturation

What Modern Jewish Scholars Say the Noah Story Meant

Contemporary Jewish scholars interpret the Noah story in multiple layers — theological, ethical, ecological, and symbolic — drawing on both ancient rabbinic traditions and modern thought.

Many commentators see Noah as a tzadik (righteous) “in his generation,” but note the nuance: his righteousness is relative to the corruption around him. Some, like Prof. Ze’ev Falk, argue that Noah’s failure to warn others reflects a divine pattern — God does not save a “crooked and perverse generation” (Deut. 32:5). Others emphasize that Noah’s covenant with God (Gen. 9) establishes universal moral laws, such as prohibitions against bloodshed, theft, sexual violence, and animal cruelty, as recorded in Sanhedrin 56a This is seen as a foundational ethical framework for all humanity.
Symbolic and Universal Themes
Rabbi Sarah Bracha Gershuny highlights the ark as a symbol of shared human vulnerability — “we are all in the same boat” — and the three decks as representing the three levels of the human soul . The story is also read as a covenantal moment, making Noah the first human to enter into a binding agreement with God, predating Abraham’s covenant

Ecological and Environmental Readings
Some modern scholars, including JTS’s Obadiah Sforno, interpret the “lawlessness” of Noah’s time as environmental destruction, with the flood as a divine reset for the planet

Others link the ark’s preservation of species to the idea of maintaining biodiversity and avoiding “crossbreeding” between humans and divine creatures, a theme in the Midrash Tanhuma

Rabbinic Expansions and Mystical Layers
The Talmud and midrash expand the narrative: Noah is imagined planting the trees for the ark’s wood, warning people of the coming flood, and even inventing the plow. he Zohar and later Kabbalistic thought sometimes contrast Noah’s generation with those of Abraham, Moses, and David, and see the flood as a cosmic purification

5. Contemporary Applications
Today, many rabbis use Parashat Noah to discuss climate change, ethical responsibility, and the need for universal moral standards The story is also read as a cautionary tale about human arrogance and a reminder that survival depends on aligning with divine justice.

Granted it is an AI summary, but it highlights that Christian literalists who try to proce an allegorical story actually happened are very simple minded. Chi dish.

 

[bilby]

Approx. 370 days from the rain beginning until Noah left the ark.

Mount Everest is ~8,849m above sea level.

That's ~24m of rain a day, across the entire planet. A metre an hour. But wait! Noah doesn't leave the ark until a while after the rain stops, and the flood peaks.

1 And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged;

2 The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;

3 And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.

So 370 minus 150 gives only 220 days of rain. That's 40m of rain per day, 1.6m per hour, across the entire planet.

The world record hourly rainfall was 0.441m, on July 3rd, 1975, at Shangdi, Nei Monggol, China.

Of course, that intensity of rain cannot be spread across a wide area; The atmosphere simply cannot hold that much moisture - that's why cyclones cover a much wider area than their thin bands of maximum rainfall. And if somehow it did, the moisture would come from evaporation (which is why cyclones die if they cross onto land, or into a region with lower sea-surface temperatures) - the net effect would be a brief lowering of global sea level, until the level was restored by water running off the land, which Genesis suggests would take about 150 days.

 

[steve_bank]

I drove across Kansas heading for Colorado.

It is hard to imagine the Kansas plain flooded with water that tops the Rockies.

 

[steve_bank]

Yes there are marine fossils on Everest, but they Are millions of years old.

We keep finding strange ocean fossils on the top of Mount Everest | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Explorers keep finding marine life fossils at the top of Mount Everest. As weird as that sounds, there's a perfectly good reason why

www.sciencefocus.com

If you scaled Mount Everest, you'd probably be surprised to find fossilised marine creatures – including trilobites, crinoids and brachiopods – on Earth’s highest peak.

Their presence hints at how the Himalayas formed around 50 million years ago. It’s also a key piece of evidence for plate tectonics.

When the supercontinent Pangea broke apart 200 million years ago, the Indian plate began moving northwards towards Asia.


Eventually, it collided with the Eurasian plate, forcing the land – including part of the seabed of the ancient Tethys Ocean – upwards.

This enormous collision created the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, lifting ocean fossils over 8,000m (26,000ft) above sea level.

The Ordovician rocks of Mount Everest - IUGS

iugs-geoheritage.org

The Ordovician rocks of Mount Everest CHINA AND NEPAL

Mount Everest (Qomolangma) is the highest point on the Earth’s crust, an iconic symbol of beauty and human achievement. Commonly known as the Roof of the World, or the Third Pole, the Himalayan plateau supports a unique ecosystem but also captures the evidence for the evolution of the best-known of the planet’s tectonic belts (Myrow et al., 2019). The summit of the mountain is a tropical Middle Ordovician limestone with abundant and diverse marine fossils that formed part of an ancient seafloor long before

The highest rocks on Earth, marking the summit of Mount Everest, are Ordovician limestones, deposited in a warm, shallow-water sea some 450 million years ago. More remarkably, these rocks still contain the fossils of marine animals such as brachiopods, conodonts and crinoids that occupied tropical habitats during one of the most important intervals in Earth history, the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE). These rocks, deposited in an ancient Tethyan Ocean were thrust and uplifted into their present commanding position when Indian collided with the Asian continent some 55 million years ago.

 

[hyzer]

Thus fossils visible “on the top” of a mountain aren't generally shells deposited on an already-existing mountaintop by an extraordinarily high ocean. They're fossils inside former seafloor rocks that became the mountain.

 

[thebeave]

I'm not so bent on these "We found the Ark" news stories. They seem to be few and far between in my navigation of the internet. What I am getting tired of is the constant "We found Amelia Earhart's plane!" stories showing up on youtube. I wish they just find the damn thing so I can get on with my life. They excalim, "we really got it this time!" and it turns out to be a vaguely plane shaped rock pile or cocoanut tree.

Another expedition to solve Amelia Earhart mystery, another failure. This time it was some trees.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Bronzeage said, in post 223, "Arguing with someone who thinks the story of Noah and the Ark is historical is a supreme waste of time."
Consider that that someone also believes in:
> an invisible creator deity
> an invisible holy ghost
> his invisible son, who supposedly watches over us
> (in some cases) the son's invisible mom, who can curry favor for us with the parts of the invisible godhead
> invisible heaven and hell, containing all of our invisible dead relatives (my dad's in hell, as he didn't believe, and my mom is probably in heaven, just to get away from him, but, no telling)
> invisible angels, with perhaps a helping of invisible demons headed by invisible Satan
> (in some cases) thousands of invisible saints, with areas of specialization, who can curry favor with the executive offices in invisible heaven

Is it any surprise that the someone's fallback position for the incredible parts of the story will be "God did it"?
This is why I'd rather goof on the topic than do much with real science & logic. Goofing is fun. I've always thought that satire is the tonic chord of atheism, and rightly so.

 

[southernhybrid]

The problem is that people who literally believe all this Bible shit don't really think enough about it. If they did and if they studied their bibles more carefully and found all the contradictions and prophesies that don't match at all, they just might figure out that it's all a bunch of mythology or fairy tales to use my son's words for religion. Because I was brainwashed by evangelicals, I never told my son what to believe. I exposed him to religion a bit and never told him I was an atheist. Then when he was 15, I asked him if he believed in god. He giggled and said, "No" and I laughed and said, "Neither do I".

I guess thinking is hard and believing in myths goes way back, but as long as they don't use their goofy beliefs for harm, whatever floats your boat is fine. Just don't try and drag others into the boat with you like the evilgelicals do.

 

[Learner]

Thus fossils visible “on the top” of a mountain aren't generally shells deposited on an already-existing mountaintop by an extraordinarily high ocean. They're fossils inside former seafloor rocks that became the mountain.

I always find these ideas intriguing as answers, which could be various explanations mentioned in posts, - being curious about the bit (the viewpoint), before there were mountains. It will be an interesting conversation..me thinks.

(Sorry I haven't been able to engage....yet .
I have quite a few dependents to worry about who need me.)

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Thus fossils visible “on the top” of a mountain aren't generally shells deposited on an already-existing mountaintop by an extraordinarily high ocean. They're fossils inside former seafloor rocks that became the mountain.

I always find these ideas intriguing as answers, which could be various explanations mentioned in posts, - being curious about the bit (the viewpoint), before there were mountains. It will be an interesting conversation..me thinks.

How to say "I don't know anything about geology" without saying "I don't know anything about geology". Forget the whole "English language" thing about how the sea life is fossilized, in the bedrock.

In my life, I have uncovered a few fossils (trilobytes), deep in shales (100+ feet of shale rock). Fissile deposits that took a long time to settle out, and then an even longer time to become rock. Most things in geology indicate a very very painfully slow process of time and pressure. Anything in geology that involves significant in the moment forces stick out like a sore thumb and are not common.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'm not so bent on these "We found the Ark" news stories. They seem to be few and far between in my navigation of the internet. What I am getting tired of is the constant "We found Amelia Earhart's plane!" stories showing up on youtube. I wish they just find the damn thing so I can get on with my life. They excalim, "we really got it this time!" and it turns out to be a vaguely plane shaped rock pile or cocoanut tree.

View attachment 55615

Another expedition to solve Amelia Earhart mystery, another failure. This time it was some trees.

A real boat wreck from 4700 years ago was found off the coast of Turkey. The wood from the boat didn't exist anymore... and that was submerged. The idea that Noah's Ark could still be in one piece despite being exposed to the atmosphere and insects is just yet another "I have no idea what I'm talking about" aspect to people who insist the Global Flood as told in the Jewish scriptures happened.

 

[southernhybrid]

https://www.jewishbible.org/articles/noahs-ark-as-metaphor/

I think this explanation from a Jewish perspective gives a pretty good explanation as to why the story of the ark should not be taken literally.

ABSTRACT
Interprets Noah's ark as a metaphor conveying significant religious meaning, examining symbolic parallels between the ark narrative and the creation story, and arguing that a metaphorical reading resolves the practical difficulties posed by a literal interpretation.

The story of Noah’s ark, understood as a metaphor, conveys a significant religious tenet, whereas as a factual occurrence it poses numerous problems. The foremost question that arises is how Noah, living as he did more than a thousand years before the Iron Age, could possibly have constructed a vessel of the size of the ark as described in the Bible. He would have had to accomplish this task without hammers, axes or saws with which to fell trees or cut to equal size those which nature had uprooted. To hold them together without nails is another unimaginable task. The history of shipbuilding tells of no vessel even remotely this size in the epoch in which Noah lived. Nor does the biblical text intimate that Noah found a vessel which had been constructed by heavenly sources; to the contrary, it says specifically that he was to build it.1

Equally hard to imagine is how Noah could have harvested, transported and stored enough food to keep himself, his family and a very large assortment of animals – some of considerable size – alive for as long a period as the ark was occupied.2 The question of the carnivorous species appears particularly problematic.

Furthermore, archeology has so far discovered no evidence of a flood of this dimension having occurred at the time when Noah lived.3

 

[ZiprHead]

Again?!?