Globe and Mail, Canada
May 30 2005
Canadian scholar to join team searching for Noah’s Ark
Monday, May 30, 2005 Page A9
Canadian Press
MONCTON, N.B. — A New Brunswick biblical scholar will join a team of
evangelical Christians this summer as they scale a Turkish mountain
in search of Noah’s Ark.
David Graves, the only Canadian on the team, will join a dangerous
and frigid expedition up Mount Ararat, where the ark is said to have
landed after the great flood.
Even if the ark was left on the mountain, which sits in eastern
Turkey near Armenia and Iran, Mr. Graves, 48, is not sure it would
have survived the ravages of time.
But the trip isn’t so much about proving whether the biblical tale of
the ark is true as it is about conducting a scientific investigation.
“It’s much more about adventure and raw research,” Mr. Graves said.
“It’s not a holy pilgrimage.”
Mr. Graves, an adjunct religious studies instructor at Atlantic
Baptist University, will travel to New Hampshire in the next week to
learn how to use ground-penetrating radar on the expedition.
He is also undergoing rigorous training to make sure he can handle
the 5,100-metre climb in the thin mountain air, and must raise $10,000
to pay for the equipment needed to climb to Ararat’s ice cap.
Mr. Graves will go to Turkey for two or three weeks with members
of Archeological Imaging Research Consortium, or ArcImaging, an
evangelical Christian group dedicated to finding the ark.
Mr. Graves was invited to join after meeting the group’s founder,
Rex Geissler, while on a religious-archeological expedition last year
in Egypt.
“What stood out was his organization and computer skills, and his
ability to put together plans,” Mr. Geissler said in a telephone
interview from Colorado.
“He exhibited a real sense of excitement about the project as well,
and that’s one thing that attracts me to people — when they’re
excited about being a part of it and helping out with it.”
Mr. Graves will use his radar training to map slices of everything
underneath the ice, straight down to the contours of the mountain’s
skin of volcanic rock.
The team will then look for any large anomalies under the ice and
return next year to excavate them.
Shards of wood are not significant enough to be considered a find,
Mr. Geissler said.
“Alleged eyewitnesses have said they saw portion of entire ark or barge
sticking out of the ice cap, so we’re looking for the whole shebang,”
he said.
In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God tells Noah to preserve life
on Earth by gathering male and female pairs of all animals on the
planet. God then unleashed 40 days and 40 nights of rain, flooding
the Earth.
According to the Bible, when the water subsided, the ark landed in
the Mount Ararat region.
The group’s 18-member team is now waiting for the Turkish government
to okay their research visas.
Mr. Graves said that isn’t an easy step, but it is something that
the research consortium has done before, in 2001, when it obtained
the first permit issued for research on Ararat’s ice cap since 1990.