Noah’s Ark found? Researchers believe this mountain is biblical ship’s final resting place
Ark investigators believe they have found traces of a wooden structure on Mount Ararat, also known as Agri Mountain, in Agri, Turkey. American researcher Professor Paul Esprante said he intends finding more evidence to prove the Ark landed there. He was one of 108 scientists from Turkey and around the world speaking at the three-day International Symposium of Mount Ararat and Noah‘s Ark in Agri, which looks at evidence put forward for the Ark's final resting place.
He said: "My purpose is to visit the sites around the mountain to find clues about catastrophic events in the past. I think that rigorous, serious scientific work is needed in the area, and I would like to collaborate in that. We have technical resources and we can work together with local experts. 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. Once the scientific community knows about the existence of Noah‘s Ark in Mount Ararat, we can make it available to the general public."
Dr Andrew Snelling wrote on Answersingenesis.org: "Several teams have continued searching for the real Ark. Most of them have focused on Mount Ararat in northeastern Turkey, where eyewitness accounts of a wooden structure have spurred interest for centuries. The biblical reference to ‗mountains of Ararat‘ as the landing site of the Ark suggests those mountains formed well before the Flood ended. The Flood was a global catastrophe that totally reshaped the earth‘s geology, and the earth‘s surface has continued to change since then. Perhaps the geology of the modern Mount Ararat region sheds light on whether we should be looking for Noah‘s Ark on that mountain."
Dr Snelling is not convinced it is the right location. "Mount Ararat is thus a post-Flood volcano, which continued to erupt, most recently less than 200 years ago. Thus, from my perspective as a biblical geologist, I do not expect to find Noah‘s Ark on Mount Ararat. Instead, it must have landed on another high mountain in the region at that time."
There have been claims made in previous years for evidence of the ark being found on the peak. In April 2010 a team of evangelical Christian explorers claimed to find the remains of Noah‘s ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Mount Ararat. Turkish and Chinese explorers from a group called Noah‘s Ark Ministries International made the claim. Filmmaker Eung Wing-cheung said: "It‘s not 100 percent that it is Noah‘s ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it."
However, the claim was not widely accepted or confirmed. Paul Zimansky, then an archaeologist specialising in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York State, said: "I don‘t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn‘t find it."
(Available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/871000/Noah-s-Ark-found-Mount-Ararat-Turkey)
The sentence "There have been claims made in previous years for evidence of the ark being found on the peak" is in the Present Perfect Continuous.
By considering this, choose the alternative bellow in which the use of the same verb tense is written in a correct form.