Correspondence: Ark Search

April 29, 2010

Dear Dr. Aardsma,

My brother sent me this link yesterday http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/27/noahs-ark-found-turkey-arafat/ reporting a new claim for discovery of Noah's ark. (The link appears to have a typo at the end, but it worked for me.)

You can find more at other websites. My son showed me a Chinese website he found about this with more photos, for example. ...

There are a lot of questions that still need answers. If the reported carbon dating is accurate, this structure is about 700 years more recent than we expected. I have not seen any mention yet of the margin of error in the dating or the details about what was tested and whether all of the appropriate corrections were made or not. Time will tell. It is exciting and certainly more promising than other recent claims that made the news.

Tom

Hello Tom,

I agree with you that it appears to be more promising than previous claims at this stage.

The radiocarbon date on the recovered wood is really the determining factor. The Flood happened ca. 3500 B.C., that we can be certain of. The wood the ark was made of must predate this, since radiocarbon measures when something dies, and the trees the timbers were made of would have been cut down prior to the Flood. So we might reasonably expect wood from the ark to date in the range of 3600 to 3500 B.C.

The news reports are all claiming a date of 4800 years ago (not B.C.) for the wood in the present case. This yields a calendar date of 2800 B.C. If this were the end of the matter the present claim would be unambiguously falsified. But there is a possibility the press and/or even the original research team has this radiocarbon date garbled, and it is this which must now be gotten to the bottom of.

Specifically, the radiocarbon date will have been reported back to the researchers from the radiocarbon lab both as a "radiocarbon age BP" date and as a "calibrated age BC" date. The "radiocarbon age BP" number is just a measure of the radiocarbon concentration in the wood and does not correspond to calendar years. The date, in true calendar years, is given by the "calibrated age BC" number.

As it turns out, the "radiocarbon age BP" corresponding to the date of the Flood (i.e., 3520 +/- 21 B.C. according to our best Biblical Chronology reckoning at present) is ca. 4770 BP. Thus, if it is the uncalibrated "radiocarbon age BP" of the wood which is appearing in the press reports, rather than the calibrated calendar age, then this wood is pretty much bang on the date expected for wood from the ark. In that case, when combined with the location of the discovery, the only reasonable conclusion would be that the wood is in fact from the ark.

I'll keep you posted as I learn more.

Dr. Aardsma