Most of us are familiar with the story depicted in the Bible, in which Noah took a male and a female of every animal aboard his boat to avoid a giant flood that was sent to destroy everything in its path. Once the flood subsided, the animals were then able to repopulate the entire planet. According to Genesis 8:4, the Ark landed on the mountains of Ararat on the 150th day of the great flood. As you would expect, this Biblical reference has drawn many teams to the site in order to discover more about its existence. But, are we about to discover more about Noah's Ark?
A team of evangelical Christian explorers claim that they have found the remains of Noah's ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Turkey's Mount Ararat. Pictures of the site also look pretty convincing. Speaking to a gathering of over 100 scientists from Turkey and around the world at a 3-day symposium, American researcher Professor Paul Esprante said he intends to uncover more evidence to prove the ark landed there.
"My purpose is to visit the sites around the mountain to find clues about catastrophic events in the past." Adding that, "rigorous, serious scientific work is needed in the area, and I would like to collaborate in that. We have technical resources and we can work together with local experts. The results of my findings will be published in books, publications and journals, but at this point it is too early to know what we are going to find. Once the scientific community knows about the existence of Noah's Ark in Mount Ararat, we can make it available to the general public."
This isn't the first team to search for the real Ark, so what makes this search different from the others? According to Dr. Andrew Snelling, "most of them have focused on Mount Ararat in northeastern Turkey, where eyewitness accounts of a wooden structure have spurred interest for centuries."
He further states that "the Biblical reference to 'mountain of Ararat' as the landing site of the Ark suggests those mountains formed well before the flood ended. The flood was a global catastrophe that totally reshaped the earth's geology and the earth's surface has continued to change since then. Perhaps the geology of the modern Mount Ararat region sheds light on whether we should be looking for Noah's Ark on that mountain," he says.
However, some archaeologists and historians are taking the latest claim that Noah's ark has been found about as seriously as they have past ones - which is to say, not very seriously at all. "I don't know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn't find it," Pauls Zimansky, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York said.
Still, according to the explorers, "It's not 100 percent that it is Noah's ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that it is," Yeung Wing-cheung, a filmmaker accompanying the explorers told The Daily Mail.