Inside the $90 Million Life-Size Noahs Ark in Rural Kentucky

In rural Kentucky, Answers in Genesis has built a full-scale replica of Noahs Ark, 510 feet long, the length of roughly two football fields, and five storeys high, designed by Indiana firm Troyer Group and constructed using timber framing, wooden pegs and joints rather than nails, the same technique used in traditional Amish barns.

The $90 million project, called Ark Encounter, opened on July 7, 2016, a date organisers chose deliberately to echo the 40 days and 40 nights of rain described in the biblical flood account. Lead architect LeRoy Troyer said the vessel was built to established engineering practices consistent with the biblical era, solid wood, pinned together, covered in pine tar, using timber sourced from beetle-damaged or sustainably managed forests. Troyer estimated the original ark took Noah roughly a century to build. So Noah had to have a lot of faith, he said.

The structure sits near Answers in Genesis’s sister attraction, the Creation Museum in Williamstown, and is the largest timber-frame structure in the United States. Ken Ham, president and founder of Answers in Genesis, framed the project as a deliberate counter to what he sees as the removal of religious reminders from American public life, and organisers projected one to two million visitors in the attractions first year.

The project sits squarely inside the young earth creationist framework: that the flood occurred roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years ago and that the earth itself is around 6,000 years old, positions that stand outside mainstream scientific consensus, which dates the earth at approximately 4.5 billion years and does not support a single global flood event on that timescale. Answers in Genesis researchers argue some of the data underlying the older estimate could be misread; that argument has not persuaded the broader scientific community, and the Ark Encounter is built explicitly for an audience that already shares the organisations theological starting point rather than to adjudicate the scientific dispute.