Explorer claims to have found evidence of Noah's Ark in Turkey's Mount Ararat

A California-based explorer has claimed that he has found new evidence that Noah's Ark rested on Mount Ararat in modern-day Turkey and the boat's remains are still up on the mountain.

More than 100 researchers from across the globe recently gathered for a three-day international symposium on Mt. Ararat and Noah's Ark in Ağrı in Turkey to find out if they can discover the boat's final resting place.

Raul Esperante of the Seventh-day Adventist Church-sponsored Geoscience Research Institute has expressed plans to visit sites around the mountain to look for new evidence.

"My purpose is to visit the sites around the mountain to find clues about catastrophic events in the past," Esperante said, according to Public Radio of Armenia.

In 2010, evangelical Chinese and Turkish researchers went on an expedition to the region to find the remains of the ark. After a few weeks, the team claimed to have found wooden specimens from an "ark-like" structure around 13,000 feet up Agri Mountain, the highest peak in Turkey.

The researchers went on to claim that carbon dating had revealed the wood to be around 4,800 years old, putting it at the same historical period when the flood was said to have occurred.

Esperante said that the discovery requires more "rigorous, serious scientific work" and he has asked for more funds to continue the research.

"The result of my findings will be published in books, publications and journals, but at this point it is too early to know what we are going to find," Esperante said, as reported by The Nation.

"Once the scientific community knows about the existence of Noah's Ark in Mount Ararat, we can make it available to the general public," he added.

Dr. Andrew Snelling, a young-Earth creationist with a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, contended that Mount Ararat cannot be the final resting place of the ark because the mountain did not form until after the flood waters receded.

Brent Landau, a biblical scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, told Newsweek that there had been many claims that the ark had been discovered around Mount Ararat. He asserted that the investigations are not being conducted from a "neutral scientific perspective" because the claims are "almost always" made by those who biblical literalists.

Landau is one of several scientists who have accepted evidence that the great flood could have occurred, although the timeline differs a bit from what appears in Genesis.

He noted that all of the previous claims about the 'Ark have turned out to be either "outright hoaxes" or "natural rock formations that look somewhat like a giant boat." He said that he is "quite confident that this present claim will turn out to be more of the same."