Noah's Ark

The Flood, by Michaelangelo, detail from the Sistine Chapel, 1509.

According to the book of Genesis, Noah's Ark (often referred to just as the Ark) was built by Noah on the directions of God to preserve Noah and his family and representatives of each of the animal kinds from the Great Flood.

Design and construction

The Ark was constructed with pitched gopher wood and had three stories divided into multiple rooms, a window, and a door. The dimensions were three hundred cubits long by fifty cubits wide by thirty cubits high. which equates to approximately 450 feet long, by 75 feet wide, by 45 feet high.

Noah was instructed by God to take aboard the Ark his wife, his three sons and their wives, male and female pairs of all the "unclean" kinds of creatures, seven (or seven pairs) each of the "clean" kinds, and enough food and supplies for everyone. , God shut them all inside the Ark and started the Flood.

The Ark's passengers were aboard for about a year. The Ark came to rest somewhere in "the mountains of Ararat", believed by many to be the mountains with that name in modern Turkey.

Before they left the ark, Noah released a raven then a dove to see if the earth was dry enough to exit.. For theories on the spread of animals after the flood see Post-Diluvian Diasporas

Controversy

Many people, including some Christians do not believe that Noah's Ark existed and have raised many objections to the existence of the Ark and the Flood. These include the following:

• a lack of room for all the animals, usually on the basis of the biblical reference to kinds being the same as species (and there are about 1,250,000 identified animal species on Earth ). Supporters of the account reject that kinds is to be equated with species, so use a much lower number.
• a lack of geological evidence for a global flood.
• The inability of the eight humans on board to care for all the creatures on board.
• The difficulty some animals would have getting to or from the ark, especially those adapted to a specific habitat, such as the sloth, which can only travel hanging on the branches of trees, and animals that live on islands and could not swim to those islands after the flood. Additionally, dinosaurs, which coexisted with humans, may also have had difficulty aboard the Ark.

Young Earth Creationists have written a number of responses to such criticisms, such as John Woodmorappe's Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study which argues that kinds is not to be equated with species, and that there would therefore be a much smaller number of creatures on the ark, and that there are ways that the humans on board could have cared for all the creatures on board. Creationary geologists have also pointed out that much of the Earth's geology is sedimentary (water-laid) rocks, as one would expect from a global flood.

In 1977, Ron Wyatt promoted a site on Mount Ararat which he claimed was the remnants of Noah's Ark. However, his findings have since come under criticism from a variety of sources including mainstream archaeologists and other Young Earth Creationists prompting Answers in Genesis, one of the world's largest creationist ministries, to make a general statement that Young Earth Creationists should not use Wyatt's claims since they are at best highly dubious.