The Ark - materials, construction and seaworthness

That's not quite right. Ebony is hard but not that hard. I've worked ebony myself making scales for pocket knives and it works pretty easily. I also have a knife made for me by David Brodziak where the handle is make from Ebony.So take that stuff about how hard it is with a grain of salt.Also, Ebony doesn't grow in the area where Noah was building his boat and no signs of it every growing there have been found.

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Think about this for one second would you...
If it is so tough to work with today's modern wood working technology Noah would have had no chance.That and for a craft the size of the ark the wood would have to be easy to work and in plentiful supply. Ebony is expensive because it isn’t that common.

Then it wasn't Ebony, the name escapes me at the moment, I have a piece of it in my basement, but there is no name on it. It's as hard as a rock, but I think it comes from Africa, and Noah wouldn't have had access to it.

Yes, I thought about that, I forgot to mention it, I was going to. I have no idea how he would have worked with it. But he sure had a lot of time, and God on his side

GOPHER WOOD, folks!! Works like balsa, stronger than aerospace composites, pegs itself together, pumps ordure overboard all by itself! Slices, dices, makes Julienne fries! Induces suspended animation in animals near it!GOPHER WOOD, that's the ticket! Enough of this teak babbling!

Do you suppose the cows would enjoy all that end-over-end flipping?

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Well it would save all that messing about with shit-pumps

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Boy, talk about completely missing the point!Using the example of the Swedish warship Wasa, I built upon Jar's point about the largest wooden ships to show how the art of shipbuilding progressed through the slow accumulation of information garnered from experience from actually building and sailing ships. Knowledge about choice of materials is part of what derives from that experience. There was no such knowledge that Noah could have drawn upon for a ship the size of the Ark.Let's say your special wood were available to Noah, and that it's the wood God commanded Noah to use (the Hebrew word for that wood used in the Bible is unknown today, according to an annotation in my NIV Bible). Given that Noah wasn't a shipbuilder or even a sailor, and given that ships of the period were mere boats with the longest maybe 20 or 30 feet, how would Noah know how to construct his boat to make it both seaworthy and structurally sound?The history of shipbuilding says that the art progressed by experience, meaning that the tables of information about boats that were 100 feet long were extrapolated to construct boats that were 110 feet long. And then experience and information about 110 boats was used to construct boats that were 120 feet long. The question posed by the history of shipbuilding is how Noah constructed a sound and seaworthy boat that was 450 feet long without a pre-existing storehouse of information about boats that size. The dimensions and details of the ark provided by God are pretty sparse. Did it have a prow? A rudder? A means for facing it into waves so it couldn't be tipped? The Wasa was 155 feet long, 38 feet wide and 172 feet high from keel to top of the main mast with 2 gun decks and 64 guns. How much like the actual Wasa do you think a model would be that was constructed from only that information? There are so many degrees of freedom that depended on the choices of the person building the model, it could end up very stable (for a warship) or very unstable. What would the testing of such a model tell them about the stability of the actual Wasa? Obviously, not a thing.So given all the unknown design choices in the construction of the ark, what would lead anyone to believe that the results from the model tested had anything to do with the ark? And, of course, a tiny model has none of the soundness of construction issues.I don't know what show you saw, but take a look at this AIG article: Here are some excerpts: And what "naval engineers" did Noah use? As I said above, God's basic dimensions still leave an enormous amount unspecified. Do you really think Noah explored this design space just like AIG to arrive at the best final design? Let me quote the first sentence again: "Little is known about the shape and form of the Ark’s hull." Then AIG goes on to say they used the results from explorers who claim to have found remains of the ark to conclude it was a "barge-type ship". I won't go into the highly questionable nature of relying upon any information from the "search for Noah's Ark" community.The article even includes equations like these: A little beyond Noah, don't you think?Basically all they did was take the information from the Bible to design the best Ark they could using modern knowledge. If such a wooden boat were even possible, highly questionable given that no wooden boat of that size has ever been constructed, Noah would have had no idea how to build it unless he had all the necessary details from God, because there is no way he could have had them himself because they simply didn't exist at the time. And, of course, here in the science forums we don't entertain "Goddidit" arguments.Moving on to the end of your post: Of course the ark had no heavy guns. That wasn't the point. The point was how the art of shipbuilding progressed one small step at a time, incorporating what was learned from existing boats into new ones. You can't just skip from building a 100 foot boot to a 200 foot boat. You first have to have information from the experiences of those who have built the 110 foot boat, the 120 foot boat, etc.A science-based approach seeks evidence. This thread is at heart very speculative because it is exploring whether a type of ship for which there is no evidence and for which we have only the sparsest of details could have floated for a year on a violent sea while full of animals. A consideration of this question based upon evidence indicates it is unlikely in the extreme. God may have just told Noah everything he needed to know, implying that what made it into the Bible is just an outline, but "Goddidit" arguments aren't permitted in the science forums.--Percy

the Directions for making the ark are in Genesis 6:15 and 6:166:15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.6:16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.A major problem with large wooden ships is that they snake and hog as you can read Here. These shape changes are unavoidable with any wave action at all and the tendency of a beam to flex increases with the cube of its length. Large wooded ships like the Wyoming required constant pumping. The ark would spring leaks all over, pitch or no pitch.It seems to me that just about the worst thing you could do under these circumstances is put a door in the side of the boat. It just gives you an additional place for the ark to spring leaks and will really undermine the stability of that side.You also have a boat with no steerage drifting around in global rainstorm for 40 days and nights. Enough water would come in the window to sink the ark nearly as fast as it would sink from leaking at the seams. Remember that even a mere thousand feet of global rain requires it to rain a foot an hour the entire time.Randy

So we should find fossils of land animals in the deep ocean eh? I had this comment from a friend on another site: Packing poo would mean anaerobic decomposition = more methane.

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Hey, hang on a bit. Wasn`t pitch derived from the effects of rotting vegetation which was deposited in the sediments DURING the Flood? Maybe Noah sent an advance order and God delivered?

*******Wasn`t pitch derived from the effects of rotting vegetation which was deposited in the sediments DURING the Flood? Maybe Noah sent an advance order and God delivered?No, This manufactured glue (pitch) was expressly produced for the lamination of wood and was well-known throughout the ancient world. There are many examples of how pitch was used by the ancients. In the ancient Roman Empire boiling birch bark and extracting the resins yielded a glue-like tar.****source noted belowLaminated or Layered WoodThis atonement scenario and the similarities between the Hebrew words in Genesis 6:14 seem to indicate that the word gopher and gopherwood are closely related to the word for pitch. In other words, the word gopherwood is not a type of wood but a wood process. Specifically the process of using pitch or bitumen combined with wood. It has often been assumed that the pitch process applied to the wood may have been only on the sides, that is the inside surface and the outside surface of the ark. In actuality, the pitch process would have been internal as well as external. Since atonement must take place not only in the outward actions of a person but also in the heart, the analogy would be complete with gopherwood having an internal coating of pitch.Interestingly, older dictionaries (Note [13]) will provide insight into the word gopher. The words wafer, gauffer, goffer, and gopher, all deal with related concepts. Definitions include: layers in a wafer, layers glued together, an adhesive to glue together layers of paper, and layers of lace in women’s clothing. The concept of layering and lamination is implied in all of these words. The term, “goffering,” comes from an old French word which is the process whereby irons are used to flute and press together various layers of lace. The early French settlers in the United States named rodents that burrowed in the earth and created layers of honeycomb [tunnels] ” gophers.The Bible reveals that Noah’s Ark was covered inside and outside by pitch. This would serve as a waterproofing agent. This pitch covering was probably natural bitumen that was commonly found in seepages in the Middle East. But what many people do not realize is that the ark’s design would also include laminated or layered wood that was glued together with a resinous tar-like coating. This manufactured glue was expressly produced for the lamination of wood and was well-known throughout the ancient world. This lamination would provide strength for the large beams required for the construction of the ark. As shown gopherwood was actually a process in which the ark’s wood was laminated and glued together with pitch and resin, a type of ancient plywood. ” by Arnold C. Mendez, Sr.Best Online Casinos Canada 2022 | Real Money Canadian Gambling

Great article, very convincing, very informative, thanks.

Yeah. Bitumen, the tarry fractions of petroleum found in seepages from rocks in the Middle East. Petroleum from living material that drowned in the Flood in rocks from sediments that were all buried by the Flood. Which hadn't happened yet.Why isn't that real convincing?And why are we worried here about the etymology of the English word "gopher" when Genesis was written down in Hebrew a millenium and a half before the English or Old French languages existed?

Thanks for that, John. Having built a few sea-craft for use in a rough sea, one thing you soon learn is not to glue stressed timber with rigid adhesives. It will either separate along the glue lines, or split the timber next to the glued section. So is the tree resin a rigid glue, or does it have a degree of flexibility? Pitch tends to be brittle over time, so maybe Noah had a secret recipe. Laminations are extremely difficult unless the sections are mated closely. Would Noah and Co. have the ability to plane sections to that degree of fit?