Every seven years or so there is a breathtaking announcement by an American fundamentalist Protestant group claiming they have found Noah’s 4,000-year-old ark in the isolated high-altitude mountainous wilds of south-eastern Turkey near Mount Ararat. It is difficult to ground check the site three kilometres from Iran and near Armenia in a place which is Kurdish by night and Turkish by day. Just to make sure you know the exact location, there are two Mount Ararats: the snow-covered 5,137-metre high Büyük Ağrı Daği and 3,896-metre high Küçük Ağrı Dağı.

A former student sent me the latest announcement knowing that I had undertaken geological studies on the ark site in summer 1994 and made remarkable discoveries. I found plastic sheets sticking out of the ‘gunwales’ of the ark, golf tees on the ‘deck’, vertical scrapings down the ‘hull’ of the boat and alpine terrestrial gastropod shells on the surface. Our pit dug on the ‘deck’ found no weathered or fossilised wood or archaeological relics. Christian fundamentalist-funded geophysics and drilling also showed nothing of interest.

The golf tees worried me. I couldn’t help wondering how the Australian blind marsupial mole found its way to the launch site, what was its golf handicap and how it managed to get back to Australia with no eyes, no ability to swim and no food. Why didn’t it settle in Middle Eastern deserts rather than return to Australian deserts? Geology showed that the structure was a sequence of ancient to modern alpine mud flows wrapped around a rigid folded outcrop that was once a piece of the 70-million-year-old ocean floor.

There certainly was a great flood in the known world. Some 8,800 years ago, water poured from the Sea of Marmara into the Black Sea Basin along an old alluvial valley which is now the Bosphorus. The Black Sea Basin was then a glacial meltwater lake with a delta formed where the Bosphorus entered the Sea of Marmara.

Carved stone tools, wooden buildings and soils covered by turbulent marine sediments have been discovered in anoxic water at 100 to 180 metres depth in the modern Black Sea. Old underwater beaches showed episodic sea level rise far faster than any scaremongering UN official could possibly concoct.

Some 50 cubic kilometres of seawater poured into the Black Sea Basin over 300 days to cover 100,000 square kilometres of land resulting from the numerous collapses into the Atlantic Ocean of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that covered Canada and northern USA. This was coupled with rapid post-glacial sea level rise that commenced 14,400 years ago. Farmland and villages were quickly inundated by salt water. Surely a farmer constructed a raft for their family and domesticated livestock for breeding? Many humans and their livestock must have died.

This formed the basis of oral history which later evolved to the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh written on clay tablets and, much later, as the two contradictory flood stories in the Bible written on parchment or papyrus sometime between 450 and 1400 BC. Both the Epic of Gligamesh and the Noah’s biblical flood are remarkably similar with a righteous hero receiving a divine message, building a multi-storey boat for his family and pairs of all animals, releasing birds to find dry land and making a sacrifice upon beaching on mountainous dry land.

God sent His flood as punishment against human evil. Sinners died. The gods sent a message to Gilgamesh because the planet was overpopulated and humans were too noisy and disturbed the sleep god Enlil. The Gilgamesh boat was cubic whereas Noah’s ark was rectangular, both of which are highly unstable. Deep in our psyche is a fear of floods and drowning which is exploited by religious fundamentalists, whether they be from a rapacious US protestant sect or a fraudulent climate catastrophist.

I leave the reader with a few of the myriad of insurmountable problems. To cover Mount Everest in a global flood, there would have had to have been an extra 4.4 billion cubic kilometres of water in the oceans. The Earth’s spin would have slowed with days and nights becoming extraordinarily long. The atmosphere would have contained 99 per cent water vapour hence no flood was necessary as sinners would have drowned just by breathing. To condense such a volume of water vapour to rain would have raised atmospheric temperature to a mild pre-cruise 3,500°C. The surface of the planet is not quicksand so where did the water go?

How did the 30 million species of known animals and plants get housed, fed and watered for that year of sea sickness in a twisting wooden vessel? How were the millions of tonnes of excreta and ammonia fumes disposed of through one small hatch? How stable was the ark if elephants had the urge to procreate? All life was loaded in a 24-hour day hence 460 species were loaded every second. How were gangplank traffic and orderly settlement into pens below decks managed? Some species of worms change sex with diet, something we may be seeing today in humans, hence there was no guarantee that a pair of worms would end up as a breeding pair after the cruise.

The human prion disease, kuru, is transmitted by eating the brains of a kuru sufferer. Which one of Noah’s family ate human brains to enable the natives of Papua New Guinea to enjoy kuru? How did Noah feed animals that only eat moving critters? How did Noah provide fresh eucalyptus leaves to koalas? Trout, otter and other animals need fresh running water. How was this done? What did the 10,000 known termite species eat for a year at sea on a wooden ark?

If all Earth history is compressed from the known 4,500-million-year age to the fundamentalist 6,000-year-old age, then continents would have raced across the Earth a million times faster than now, thereby producing a huge bow wave, perpetual earthquakes, constant super-volcanoes and monstrous tidal waves. Why was this not recorded? Simple! One can’t write history when notes get shuffled by tsunamis, choking lung-lithifying volcanic dust makes it impossible to see and the desk wobbles too much for legible writing. If the ark beached at Mount Ararat, surely over the last 4,000 years the previous populations of Urartu, Sasanian, Persian, Armenian, Byzantine, Seljuk, Mongol, Russian, Ottoman, Kurdish and Turkish people would have scavenged firewood from the beached ark for building, warmth and cooking at high altitude?

In my life, there have been scare campaigns about floods, famine, extraterrestrials, asteroid impacts, earthquakes, fires, extinction, pollution, deforestation, global cooling, global warming, pandemics and now new technology. We live in technological times with uncritical irrationality thriving in a dumbed-down education system.

With terms such as disinformation, misinformation and duty of care, it may soon be illegal to use life experience, logic, knowledge, education or critical thinking to question governments, bureaucrats and the judiciary. Beware of those promoting nonsense.