John, you've reminded me of a news article from about 4 years ago that I found mildly amusing. The city of Gloucester was partly flooded, and the local TV news crew were interviewing the residents of Meadow Close, who were complaining about how little help they were getting from the council after their homes were flooded. I couldn't help thinking "well, duh"; the meadow in question is on the flood plain of the Severn, and most of Gloucester (on the east side of the river) is about 3 m higher than the little section to the west of the river...

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

That's not speculation. The Nova"Ring of Truth" video series narrated by Phil Morrison of MIT clearly presents the evidence for the repeated drying and flooding of the Mediterranean basin. Gravel deposits near the Gibralter straits indicate the rushing waters. Each time the ice ages marched, the oceans dropped, leaving the Med isolated from the Atlantic. The evaporation rate of the Med exceeds the fresh water inflow from all it's sources...so water continuously flows from the Atlantic to it, during interglacials.(now) Consequently, it is getting saltier.
When the ice age approaches, and the oceans isolate the Gibralter straits, the Med slowly evaporates to dryness...completely. Salt flats on the bottom indicate this.It happened multiple times. You could walk to Africa from Europe

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A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov

You can now - it's just a much harder walk (via the Ukraine or Belarus, east of the Black Sea, through bits of the Middle East, to Sinai, and ... oh, wait, there's the Suez canal in the way).

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

No one seems to have mentioned the obvious here. Glaciers on mountainsides are flowing! While glaciers may remain on mountaintops for over 5,000 years, (I think that's about when the Noah story took place), the ice in a flowing glacier would have spit out the Ark years ago.

As to wood preservation, anywhere bacterial and fungal growth can be slowed preservation can occur. This happens in oxygen poor deep water as well as in ice. Don't know how reliable Today’s Oldest Living Things web site is but they note which requires unfossilized wood to test, IIRC.

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

and Numenor is based on....?

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"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

--Ambrose Bierce

http://threelittleboxes.com

And you would win that bet.

About 2 hours ago, I saw Porcher Taylor interviewed on CNN. He admitted that the "object" in the satellite image was twice as long as the length traditionally given for the ark...

But that didn't stop him...oh no...

He presented a 1947 picture of "something" on the side of Mt. Ararat (it looked like an outcropping of rock)...along side that a drawing made in the 1600's showing the "ark" (and it even "looked" like an ark) in the same spot on the mountain.

To him, this was evidence.

Taylor "wants" to find the ark....from the OP link...

I'm also wondering if a "security analyst" has the "investigative tools" needed to be able to identify the remains of a wooden boat which would have to be thousands of years old.

Interestingly enough, in the CNN interview he was identified as a "professor"...they did not say a professor of what.

Obviously, I am unconvinced by Mr. Taylor's "evidence".

Sorry to go off topic, but if the ark was that big and evolution is invalid, how did Noah find the room to put two of every animal species on earth inside? Seems to me there would be little room for all the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit-bats and large chu--

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"It was a crime of passion! Not premeditated dentistry!"

You're only scratching the surface of problems with the story. It gets a lot worse the more you think about it. See
Talk Origins

I saw a news article this week about estimates of the number of species currently living on Earth. Just now I can't remember the number, but it was very large indeed.

I always get a mental image of koala bears swimming from Australia to the middle east, with large eucalyptus branches (their only food, that is native nowhere else) strapped on the their backs. And then swimming back again.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

The Numenor response was a joke. This was the name of the island kingdom of men in Tolkien's world. I was destroyed and disappeared into the sea (I think, my memories a little fuzzy on the specifics).

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Earth First! We'll mine the rest later.

One school of thought in creationism gets round the "fitting them all in the ark" problem by proposing a (hold on to your irony meters!) staggeringly rapid bout of speciation after the Flood. That way, they just need one "kind" of each animal - not two of each antelope, for example, but a pair of generic horned beasties.

Aurora, I find some of the biogeographic implications amusing as well. And let's not even start on the freshwater fish. I also want to know how one small family managed to keep shovelling all that, er, waste overboard. No wonder they ran aground.

I enjoy Noah's Ark story a lot more when I don't take it literally word by word .

though I must admit that the thought of really getting a pair of each and every species inside does give enjoyable pictures in my head (like the idea that the long neck of a giraffe is the result of the pre-ark horselike giraffe getting its neck squeezed between the elephants in the ark ). And obviously, if you put the animals that close togehter, you're bound to end up with a lot more than a pair of each in the end .

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I'm debating this very thing on another forum, it's an uphill struggle, as if they don't want to reply to a point I make they can simply say "God did it." However, I've come up with some interesting figures, and I wouldn't mind getting them checked.

Water needed to flood the world up to the peak of Mt. Everest:
Surface area of the Earth: 510 065 284 000 m^2
Height of Mt. Everest: 8 840m
Cubic Metres of water needed: 510 trillion (8 840) = 4 508 977 110 560 000m^3
4 508 977 110 560 000m^3 = 4 508 977 560L

Approx. Volume of Earth's oceans 1 347 000 000L (source,)

4 508 977 560L / 1 347 000 000L = 4

The amount of water needed to flood the Earth is 4x the amount currently in the Earth's oceans. (I think I've done that right, if I've made a mistake I'd like to know.)

They also claim that Noah only had to take on two of every kind of animal, which have become modern creatures. This would, apparently, allow Noah to only have to take 50 000 species on board. I heard somewhere that there are 1.5 million currently existing land-based species, and this flood (apparently) happened 5 000 years ago.
This leads me to conclude that, on their own terms, 290 species must appear every year ((1 500 000 - 50 000)/5 000 = 290), rather drastic for those people who don't believe in Evolution.

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'Floodologists' get round the water problem by saying the Earth was flat before the flood so that a lot less water is needed. Baby animals were taken so they were smaller and they hibernated. Plus only those with 'the breath of life in them' are taken as per instructions so no insects or fish required. As the 'median' animal size is also that of a Cat not as much space is needed anyway.

On the debit side Noah was told to take 7 each male and female of the 'Clean' animals.!

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All Moderation in Purple

My calculations assume a totaly flat Earth, with a mt. Everest peak at it's curreny height, even if the oceans were created post-flood, you still have 3x the amount of water currently there to explain away.

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The Numenor response was hewhocave's own joke!

The point he was making was that Tolkien's Numenor was based on Plato's Atlantis, so there is no compelling reason to believe in the one but not the other.

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- Learn a lot teaching others.

Well there you are, it's not totaly flat if you include Mt everest is it? Mountains and ocean basins only appeared when the land was pushed up and the sea beds lowered to drain the land of all the water.

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All Moderation in Purple

Some pretty fancy geology, as well as geometry.

Earth changing between a plane and a sphere; and mountains, basins, and oceans coming and going like rabbits out of a hat.

Wish I could have been there to see it.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Just got back to this thread.

Sorry; but you just bent my brain here. What the heck do these idi...people think the flood did to the Earth? Bend it?

I guess most of it sloshed overboard while the Earth was bending?

Oy.

Maybe without mountains or ocean basins is a better way of saying it. Not flat in the sense of a plane rather than a sphere.

Remember there was no rain at all before the flood.

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