The story of Noah's ark is one of the most beloved Old Testament tales.
Noah built that ark for a long time, then there was the great flood, and all the animals
boarded two by two and so on.
But what's the real story of the ark?
Here's the untold truth of Noah's ark.
One of the most famous supposedly-Noah's-ark sites is the admittedly very boat-looking
Durupinar site in Turkey.
According to Atlas Obscura, the site was exposed in the late 1940s after a series of earthquakes
and storms.
What's odd about this place is how long it has persisted as "the remnants of Noah's ark"
when it was excluded as a possible resting place for the famed ship during the first
initial investigation in 1960.
No evidence has been found that there is any ship there, nor has any actual petrified wood
been located there, with the exception of a few fragments that probably arrived in a
mudslide.
The boat-shaped formation is actually just rock and hardened mud.
It appears boat-like but contains no evidence of the timbers or iron fastenings that would
have been used in a large boat's construction.
Oh, and all that petrified animal poop on the site really doesn't prove anything, either,
because of the whole "animals have been roaming the world for millions of years" problem.
In 2010, a group of evangelical Christian explorers announced they'd located the remains
of Noah's ark near the summit of Mount Ararat in Turkey.
According to National Geographic, the team says they found a structure comprised of seven
large wooden compartments.
When they radiocarbon-dated the wood, they determined it was roughly 4,800 years old,
which is precisely in the right range to correspond with the Biblical Noah story.
Not everyone thinks that really proves anything, though, even if it's true.
NBC News says the structure is more likely to be an ancient shelter than a giant boat.
And it's also a problem when someone goes into that kind of expedition without an innate
sense of skepticism.
Stony Brook University archaeologist Paul Zimansky put it like this:
"I don't know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn't find it."
Tales of catastrophic floods are not just limited to what we've read in the Old Testament,
as it turns out, there are a lot of very old stories about horrific floods.
And some archaeologists and geologists believe the stories might be based on things that
really happened, however embellished they may have become over the years.
According to ABC, one such theory was put forward by two scientists at Columbia University,
who believe the Black Sea was once a freshwater lake that became inundated by rising seawater
from the Mediterranean.
In 1999, the theory attracted the attention of underwater explorer Robert Ballard, who
you might remember from such historic discoveries as the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck.
Ballard's team found evidence of an ancient shoreline 400 feet below the surface and determined
through radiocarbon dating that the area was likely flooded during the time of the Biblical
Noah.
Ballard claimed to have also found structures in the area, but we really haven't heard much
about the expedition since those first reports came out 20 years ago.
These days, Ballard seems more focused on mapping the seafloor on the opposite side
of the planet.
In 1872 an Englishman named George Smith discovered a cuneiform tablet that told a familiar story
about a guy and a boat and a humanity-killing flood.
According to the New Yorker, all the specifics were there, too, including the mountaintop
the ship eventually landed on and the whole dove incident.
There are some differences, though.
In the Mesopotamian version, it wasn't one god but the ancient Mesopotamian gods and
goddesses who flooded the entire world and everyone in it.
Also, the gods didn't decide to wipe out all of humanity because it had become all corrupt
and unsalvageable, but mostly just because humans were vaguely annoying.
So here's a tip: Don't do things that gods find annoying.
Another thing the cuneiform tablets had in common with the Noah story is the building
instructions, although the "ark" itself isn't constructed in the same way in each story,
there are enough details and measurements provided that someone should be able to use
them to construct their own vessel.
You know, just in case.
A lot of the debate about Noah's ark has to do with the amount of weight a ship that size
could have actually supported.
Obviously, it would have sucked if Noah had spent all that time building a ship and loading
it up with animals and then it had sunk anyway because there were too many dang animals on
board.
According to the Telegraph, in 2014 a group of master's students at Leicester University
decided to settle the question.
They used the Biblical measurements to calculate the size of the ark, then they used the density
of the water to figure buoyancy, and from there determined how much weight the ship
could endure before sinking.
Their conclusion: Noah could have put 70,000 animals onboard and the ship would have floated.
"Hey whaddya know?
It floats!"
"That was my plan all along."
There are issues with their conclusion, though.
For example, the measurements figured on Noah's boat being so heavy that the water level would
stop just below the top of the ship, which means it would have been pretty vulnerable
to waves, especially the sorts of waves that were happening as the storm raged on for 40
days and 40 nights.
And the study did not calculate things like the physical size of each creature, only its
weight.
But it did prove one of the larger questions about the feasibility of such a voyage.
So hooray.
One problem that the Noah's ark story seems to avoid is the whole issue of genetics.
When Noah and his family got off the ark, their only Tinder options would have been,
well, Noah and his family.
It's not just long-held social taboos and the overall ick factor that warns us against
inbreeding, it's been scientifically proven to be a super bad thing.
Even with eight people as a base, the gene pool would be too small to make world repopulation
feasible.
"Okay, on the count of three, say what level of cousins we would have to be for this to
be okay.
One, two, three."
"Fifth."
"Unacceptable no matter what."
"Oh, this is never gonna work."
According to the BBC, you can look at history for an example of why inbreeding is bad.
Charles II of Spain was so disabled he didn't learn to walk until the age of 8, and that's
because of all the inbreeding in his extended background.
The number of identical inherited genes he got from both parents was higher than if his
parents had been brother and sister with a normal tree before that.
So that explains a lot about Joffrey Baratheon...
"I am the KIIING."
...and it makes you wonder how the current human population could have waded out of such
a dangerously shallow gene pool.
The Bible gave very specific measurements for Noah's ark, which not only provided early
readers with a solid set of details in an otherwise implausible story but also paved
the way for giant replicas of Noah's ark at theme parks and tourist attractions.
In 2012, a life-sized replica of the ark opened in the Netherlands and has been welcoming
3,000 paying customers a day ever since.
According to Today, the replica took three years to build and cost more than a million
dollars.
And then Kentucky just couldn't resist getting on the bandwagon, and in 2016 a life-sized
replica of Noah's ark called "Ark Encounter" opened in Williamstown.
Inside the ark are exhibits that include, among other things, cages filled with dinosaurs.
So if you're a science person, you might want to give that one a pass.
So there's this whole little thing called science that sort of gets in the way of the
Noah's ark legend, and science is pretty sure that evidence for a catastrophic worldwide
flood just doesn't exist in the geologic record.
According to the Skeptical Inquirer, you can find evidence of drying in some parts of the
world that correspond precisely to the time the Earth was supposedly completely covered
with water.
There are other examples, too, the dunes and other desert deposits that exist in various
places on the planet would not be there if the world had been inundated by water.
And if there had really been a flood that covered the entire world, most of the sedimentary
rock on Earth would lie at the bottom of the ocean.
But the continents are covered with sedimentary rock, which contradicts what we would expect
if there were a flood 5,000 years ago.
And that's just geology.
Archaeology causes even more problems, especially when you look at Turkey, where the ark supposedly
came to rest as the flood waters were receding.
Stony Brook University archaeologist Paul Zimansky explained:
"We know what's going on with Turkey archaeologically at that time, and there's no major interruption
in the culture."
Dangerous hobbies aren't really anything new, lots of people climb mountains without safety
gear, jump off cliffs wearing wingsuits, and participate in sports as nonsensical as extreme
ironing.
But when you combine dangerous hobbies with dangerous obsessions and a desire for discovery-related-fame,
well, that can be fatal.
Over the years, a lot of people have become obsessed with the idea of finding Noah's ark.
Most of them have teamed up into proper, organized expeditions, which tend to be safer than traipsing
off into the wilderness alone.
But some people, like Donald Mackenzie, set off alone in search of the ark.
Unfortunately, Mackenzie's obsession ultimately led to his disappearance and presumed death,
on his way to see the site located earlier in 2010, he got caught in an early blizzard
and disappeared.
So maybe there was enough room for all those animals and maybe the ark could support all
that weight, and maybe it somehow miraculously didn't get inundated by storm waters.
But if it really did float for seven months, how was there enough room onboard for all
the food necessary to sustain all those animals, and how did eight people manage to do the
job of caring for them all?
"So I really have to be amongst these beasts?"
"Yes, sir."
"Alright.
You don't have to hit them or nothing?"
"No, don't ever hit them."
"Okay."
Anyone who's ever worked at a zoo can tell you that housing a bunch of animals in small
spaces isn't just about throwing food at them and shoveling tons of poop overboard.
According to the National Center for Science Education, each cage has to be specifically
designed to meet the needs of each individual species, from the height of food and watering
troughs to the diameter of the birds' perches.
As the story goes, Noah found land with the help of a dove, who returned to the ark carrying
an olive branch, proof that the flood waters were finally receding.
But according to the Skeptical Inquirer, water and trees don't exactly mix.
"Oh my god the tree's in the water.
I gotta get it.
I gotta go."
In the Biblical tale, the ark floated for five months before it came to rest at the
top of Mount Ararat.
But a 2016 study found that an olive tree submerged in water for just three months died.
Another experiment showed that submerged grass died after just a month underwater.
That would have left the herbivores with nothing to eat after disembarking.
And Noah's vineyard, which he planted shortly after the flood, would also not have survived
because the soil would have become too saturated with salty sea water.
Everything would have been salty.
"Salt?
Cracked black pepper?"
And that's just the botany part of the equation.
What would happen if you released thousands of herbivores and thousands of predators back
into the same environment?
You'd end up with a lot fewer than the two of each herbivore, unless you gave them a
head start of a decade or two.
Anyone who has seen Waterworld knows that when the polar ice caps melt the world will
be covered by oceans and everyone will live on implausible-looking boats and spend all
their time searching for the mythical Dryland and drinking their own pee.
A Waterworld-like scenario would never actually happen, though, because there literally is
not enough water on Earth to cover the entire world.
According to the American Museum of Natural History, if all the ice on Earth melted, sea
levels would rise about 230 feet, which would mean the end of most coastal cities but would
stop far short of actually covering the entire planet.
So if there really was a worldwide global flood, all that water not only receded but
somehow also left Earth altogether.
But really, that's probably the least of the story's problems.
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