Underwater archaeologist claims to have found evidence for Noah's Ark

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
12/13/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Archaeologist previously famous for discovering remains of Titanic in 1985

Underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard, famed for discovering the Titanic back in 1985, has claimed to have found evidence for an even more historically significant ship - Noah's Ark from the Old Testament. According to the bible, Noah fled and floated upon the waters for 40 days and 40 nights. Ballard says that the Black Sea was once merely a freshwater lake, until an enormous wall of water from the Mediterranean 200 times more powerful than Niagara Falls swept it and everything else away, Noah, his ark and all.

Some archaeologists have supported the story of Noah, citing similar details passed along in narratives from Mesopotamian times, notably 'the Epic of Gigamesh.'

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - "We went in there to look for the flood," Ballard told ABC News. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed ... the land that went under stayed under."

Ballard's team is studying the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of a civilization lost since biblical times. The recent dig is in response to two Columbia University scientists who say they have connected the end of an Ice Age, when frozen sheets covered North America and stretched to the North Pole.

When they melted, yielding the Earth's terrain the world is familiar with today, what happened to the water?

"The questions is, was there a mother of all floods?" Ballard asks.

Through carbon dating of shells found on an ancient shoreline 400 feet beneath the surface of the Black Sea, scientists have established a timeline for that catastrophic event that happened around 5,000 B.C., Ballard estimates. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred.

Some archaeologists have supported the story of Noah, citing similar details passed along in narratives from Mesopotamian times, notably "the Epic of Gigamesh."

"The earlier Mesopotamian stories are very similar where the gods are sending a flood to wipe out humans," biblical archaeologist Eric Cline says. "There's one man they choose to survive. He builds a boat and brings on animals and lands on a mountain and lives happily ever after? I would argue that it's the same story."

Ballard claims that his team has found not just the shore and the shells, but pottery and even shipwrecks, evidence. Ballard doubts that Noah's Ark itself will ever turn up.

"It's foolish to think you will ever find a ship," Ballard told ABC News. "But can you find people who were living? Can you find their villages that are underwater now? And the answer is yes."

� 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM

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Keywords: Robert Ballard, Noah's Ark, Titanic, archaeology

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1 - 6 of 6 Comments

DarwinsMyth
4 months ago
The Bible doesn't say, Noah floated on the waters for 40 days and nights... that's how long it rained on the Earth. The Bible shows that Noah and his family was on the Ark for about 10 months before they saw dry land... that is NOT a regional flood. Also, experts believe the Flood occurred about 2345 B.C... that's about 4300 yrs. ago, not 5,000 yrs. ago. There are fossilized clams on nearly every mountain on Earth as evidence of a worldwide Flood. There is also salt water on mountains. The BILLIONS of fossils are also evidence for the worldwide Flood, as the creatures were preserved, including soft-bodied creatures (i.e. jelly fish) when the Great Flood quickly covered them with tonnage of mud. They sure don't fit with evolution... those "missing links" are still missing, and the Archaeopteryx was a unique bird, just like the Dodo.

The Holy Bible can be trusted, historically.
The Grey Piper
4 months ago
PS to Mr Henderson: sea shells certainly can be carbon-dated.
You can have it sone here: http://www.radiocarbon.com/carbon-dating-shells.htm

Perhaps you are thinking of this:

http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=799

"scientists have discovered that one commonly used shell can produce apparent dates thousands of years older than the event that exposed them."

As JoeNavy says . . . nice try.
The Grey Piper
4 months ago
Well of course the significance of the story is the care of God for Noah and his family, it isn't meant to be an academic dissertation on geology; that's Fundamentalism's error. In any event, I have read elsewhere that the same word which is usually rendered as "land" in the OT is the same word used in the Noah story, but is often rendered or understood as "world," due to traditional interpretation. In other words, when Scripture says that a flood covered "all the land," it means it as nation, or district, or some other area more or less ambiguous: much as in the phrase, "stranger in a strange land": surely this does not suggest interplanetary travel, does it? (Except in the Heinlein novel of that name, of course.) Or the more modern song title, "This land is your land," which certainly does not suggest the entire world is ours.

Sometime about the year 300, I believe it was St. Augustine of Hippo who made the observation that if Scripture seems to tell us one thing, and the clear evidence of our eyes tells us something else, we must change our understanding of what Scripture is trying to teach us: an ancient lesson forgotten by Fundamentalists, and by skeptics as well.

JoeNavy . . . nice try.
JoeNavy
5 months ago
"The flood was world-wide"
Except for how it wasn't because at that time the pyramids where being built and Asian civilizations were building documented empires that never recorded a global flood...nice try.
DarthJ
5 months ago
Scripture and Tradition (as well as science) make it very clear that the Flood waters covered the entire earth, not just a lake somewhere, as the modernists suggest.
Michael E Henderson
5 months ago
The title of this article is misleading, at best. He never claimed to have found the ark, and says that it would be foolish to expect to. All he claims to have found was evidence of a large flood in that area. Even if there was a flood, it proves only that there was a flood. Not the myth of Noah's Ark.

To answer the question of where the water went, it went into the oceans, just as it is now.

By the way, you can't carbon date shells.

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