Obviously, you have to be majorly delusional to think that Noah’s Ark existed, let alone think that you found it.
I’m just wondering about the last sentence, some variant of which appears in all the articles about this:
What would be the process by which fossils could become buried in petrified wood? Any idea how long it would take for the wood to petrify and encase the fossils?
I thought it took millions of years to petrify wood.
Nah, Answers in Genesis answers that, as does the work of this DOE lab in washington state.
While some wood is petrified over millions of years, if conditions are right, the natural process can be mch quicker. For example, some of the petrified wood deposits around lake superior are young enough to be carbon dated.
As for shells in the wood, if a log sank, and snails crawled into knotholes etc. before petrification, you’d find their fossils inside the petrified wood. I’m not sure how that’d work out for Noah’s boat, unless he built it of petrified wood. Maybe God lent him a rock saw?
I’m not sure what they’re trying to prove with that information. Best guess:
"Look, the whole place is a desert, right? And there are sea animals, right? That proves there was a Great Flood just like it says in the Bible, because there’s no way sea animals would be here at any other time.
"And also, there’s no wood here in the desert. Since the place is a desert, it must be because God made it that way. That means the wood must have been brought here by humans!
"And since the sea animal is in the wood, that means it all happened at the same time as the Flood.
“The only person who could possibly have brought wood here during the Great Flood is Noah; therefore, this is Noah’s Ark. QED.”
Seems as if there are a lot of logical leaps and unstated assumptions in that line of thinking — presuming, of course, that is a proper encapsulation of it. If it were a true representation of the thought process, one would hardly know where to begin in refuting it.
Oops! I thought we were in Great Debates.
I apologize for examining the Noah’s Ark bit without addressing the actual factual question asked.
The conditions for creating fossilized wood (in nature) generally require a source of mineral-rich water, which slowly exchange with the organic cellular material; and some kind of preservation of the original sample, often by covering it with sediment, to keep it from being devoured by rot.
Sediment suggests running water, so that the minerals can flow around and through the sample. The Petrified National Forest in Arizona was speculated to once have been a tropical or sub-tropical forest during the Triassic period. The silicate-rich water may have been fed by the ashfall of a nearby volcano. Another petrified forest is located in Greece and is estimated to be 20-25 million years old.
That doesn’t tell us that it takes millions of years. It’s possible that it only takes a thousand years, but they were undiscovered for millions of years, if there were no humans around to discover them. Perhaps, too, they were only recently unburied from their protective sediment.
Given that our records only go back a measly few thousand years, all we can really say is that we haven’t encountered very many samples of naturally occurring petrified wood that are less than millions of years old.
Not really. It depends on what you think “Noahs Ark” was- do you take the Flood story literally, figuratively, or as a Legend perhaps based in a very real huge flood?
Clearly, the Literal story of the Flood is scientificly impossible. However, the other two are not. And, there are many similar Flood myths in other ancient Mythologies, enough for a reasonable person to assume they were perhaps based upon something. The Tigris-Euphates valley was prone to floods. Thinking that there could have been one *really fucking huge flood *that was memorialized in legend then Myth is hardly delusional.
Next- early Xtians made replicas of many biblical things, such as the Coptics making replicas of the other Ark. It is certainly possible that some sect made an “ark” almost two thousand years ago, and modern dudes finding it thus could happen.
Exapno. NOT a great lead line in asking a GQ question.
DrDeath. Thanks for the “soft” answer in rebuttal.
samclem General Questions Moderator
Also, isn’t the Black Sea often mentioned as a possible source of the Flood myth, with evidence showing of a relatively (3-5000 years BCE) recent flooding of much of the current sea basin? I remember Dr. Ballard had been involved in some interesting, if inconclusive, dives finding evidence of shoreline settlements several hundred feet below the current sea level.
I do believe that if one looks at the math for how a below sea level basin would flood if suddenly opened up to a resevoir of water, the behavior of such a flood would be devastating through a large area. If, as some scientists believe, the Black Sea basin had been a dry, or mostly dry, basin during some point in relative recent history, it would have been a disaster of literally Biblical proportions when it flooded.
I don’t present this as an better alternative explanation to Dr. Deth’s suggestion of a massive Tigris/Euphrates regional flood, just another possible inspiration for Noah’s or Gilgamesh’s flood.
With all due regards to samclem, I was deliberately differentiating between flood mythology and the specific inerrist belief in Noah’s Ark, a flood that could have covered the Earth with water to the level of tens of thousands of feet and receded without leaving any signs, the building of an ark that size by a small family without modern tools, the gathering of all the animals in the world and the repopulating thereof, etc. And I was also referring to a specific claim for the specific Biblical Noah’s Ark by an inerrist believer who is making all the above claims for his find, not merely some boat by some sect to ride out some flood.
I’m not sure who could find this claim acceptable, but my characterization of it is not in the least different than characterizations of any of hundreds of scams, frauds, crackpot inventions, medicines, “scientific” breakthroughs, and other nonsense that have been made repeatedly and in much stronger language debunked in GQ over the past several years.
Now, DrDeth, do you have any information relevant to the question I asked? If not, I assure you that I know Biblical archaeology theory quite well, thank you, and don’t need a basic refresher course.