MOUNT ARARAT, Turkey, May 21, 2004 — Archaeology has already confirmed much of the history written in the Good Book. This summer, a team of 'Ark-eologists' will go in search of the ultimate find: the Bible's Big Boat.
"For one hundred fifty days the water slowly went down. Then on the seventeenth day of the seventh month of the year, the boat came to rest somewhere in the Ararat mountains. The water kept going down, and the mountain tops could be seen on the first day of the tenth month." - Genesis 8:3-5 (CEV)
The location of Noah's ark is one of the Bible's oldest mysteries, one that explorers have tried to solve since Biblical times. Using Scripture as a compass, explorers are able to narrow their search down to 'the Ararat mountains'. The problem is that the Ararat mountain range is one of the largest in the world, extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Himalaya Mountains, and at high elevations - where the Ark landed according to Scripture - the mountains are covered by snow and ice year-round.
In a press conference last month, however, Shamrock - the Trinity Corporation unveiled satellite images that they believe to be the lost ark, and announced their intentions to mount a $900,000 (US) expedition this summer to determine the exact nature of the structure known as the 'Ararat Anomaly'.
Photographing the Anomaly
The summer of 2003 was the hottest summer Europe has seen in 500 years, causing a massive meltdown on Mount Ararat and providing a great opportunity to take a new series of photographs of the anomaly using DigitalGlobe's Quick Bird satellite, the world's highest-resolution commercial imaging satellite. The resulting images reveal a dark patch protruding from the middle of a glacier about 4,700 metres above sea level. A close-up of the patch shows what looks like three vertical beams and a cross beam.
"These new photos unequivocally show a man-made object," said Daniel P. McGivern, a Christian entrepreneur and president of Shamrock. "I am convinced that the excavation of the object and the results of tests run on any collected samples will prove that it is Noah's Ark."
This is not the first time that the anomaly has been photographed. The first pictures of the site, taken by the U.S. Air Force in June of 1949, revealed the unique feature on the mountain's north-western slope, fuelling speculation that it could be a strange rock formation, a crashed airplane, a fortress or some other structure hundreds of years old, or, of course, Noah's Ark. These photos were held in a confidential file until 1997, when the U.S. government released several of the images, but experts deemed them inconclusive.
In 1999 and 2000, photos of the mountain were taken by the IKONOS 2 satellite owned and operated by Space Imaging of Thornton, Colorado. These images were then scrutinized by a seven-person team of independent scientists. While the team was divided in its interpretation of the images, one team member concluded that the anomaly had apparently shifted from its position in 1949, suggesting that its composition was foreign and not a chunk of the mountain. The colour of the anomaly also appears to be different from that of the surrounding strato-volcanic rock.
Genesis 6:15 puts the dimensions of the ark at 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. According to McGivern, the object sticking out of the ice in the Quick Bird photos is at least 50 feet by 70 feet. The IKONOS imagery suggests that it may be broken into several pieces.
The Search Is On
McGivern is putting together a team of 30 American and Turkish scientists, forensic specialists and archaeologists to scale the mountain and explore the site from July 15 to August 15.
"I do hope to bring people to faith in God," says McGivern, "but this is a non-religious, scientific expedition to prove that Noah's Ark really exists on the top of that mountain."
Exploration of the region was prohibited until 1982 because of Soviet complaints that explorers were spying, and Turkish military operations against Kurdish rebels in the area have limited access to the mountain since 1991. Nonetheless, numerous teams of explorers have tried to reach the anomaly - located on a treacherous 45-degree slope - over the years but failed to substantiate what the object is.
The field manager for the expedition will be Dr. Ahmet Ali Arslan. A college professor at Selcuk University in Konya, Turkey, Arslan grew up in the region and has climbed the mountain as many as 50 times in 40 years.
Finding the ark would go a long way toward substantiating the Biblical flood narrative, a story that secular scientists have largely dismissed in spite of geologic evidence of a massive flood in the Mesopotamian region some 6,000 years ago.
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