The Great Flood and Noah’s ark is a tale believed by millions. God instructs Noah to build a ship to save his family and two of every animal on the Earth. It’s a God-made flood to remove sinners. Noah rescues animals of every kind, and many creationists also believe dinosaurs lived on Noah’s boat.
What’s even more interesting is that there are Christian apologists who give serious thought to resolving the logical problems that arise when considering the implications of such a worldwide catastrophic event such as The Great Flood.
Problems like:
- How did the plants survive The Great Flood?
- What about the destruction of all the ecosystems?
- Who cleaned up the dead after the flood when water levels fell?
- How were the animals redistributed over the globe?
It’s an answer to the last question in the aftermath of The Great Flood, that this article examines.

Credit: Gerhard Gellinger on Pixabay
A possible solution to a problem inherent in the story of Noah
In the story of Noah, the events of The Great Flood killed all land-dwelling life on Earth. All except for those saved by Noah. These animals became a ‘seed’ population at a single location, the landing point of the ark.
The landing area is discontiguous. That is, there’s still ocean between it and other continents. The problem this presents for the story of Noah is that there are no apparent means by which animals can return home if the land is disconnected.
Creationists believe, they have found a possible solution to these apparent problems.
Volcanoes: A solution to reseeding the Earth for the Genesis story
American conservatives and Christian fundamentalists over at Conservapedia proposed The Post-Noachian Flood Volcano Theory. It comes from the example of Krakatoa, which erupted in 1883 and destroyed most of the island which remained lifeless for many years.
They observed the same life that was on the island before the eruption eventually came back when Little Krakatoa was born.
One proposal (which Conservapedia removed in recent years to only appear on their talk page), was that it was possible that volcanoes in the Mount Ararat region transported smaller, non-flying animals back to their original habitats.

Credit: skeeze on Pixabay
This proposal is the type of answer you get when you start with a presumption and are forced to try and give a plausible reason for the absurd.
To imagine those small animals are jettisoned up into the sky, (and in some cases, the trajectory would require into space), to solve the problem of how the animals spread back across the world following the great flood is hysterical.
It is the kind of argument a young child might hypothesize. At least they’re thinking outside the box. But you wouldn’t for a moment believe that they were onto something.
There’s not much else to be said.
Even without a scientific explanation, rudimentary powers of logic and reasoning alone are enough to understand death is imminent. If you get caught in the blast of a volcano enough to eject you across a great distance, it’s going to blow you apart.
Not to mention, it would be nothing short of a miracle to survive the landing. But if you believe miracles are possible, why not transport the cuddly little animals by less traumatic means?
Why not teleportation?
You could argue that God works within the laws of physics; though a miracle is by definition a suspension of the laws of physics, still, let’s go with this.
You can argue then that teleportation is outside the bounds of laws of the Universe; though that may one day prove not to be the case. But being ejected into the sky by a volcano to travel a great distance and land safely, while still be intact and capable of reproducing offspring, is also outside the known laws of physics.
No matter how generous I can be with this argument, I can’t lend teleportation or ejection with redistribution by a volcano one ounce of plausibility.
And so it seems, nor can the consensus of editors over at Conservapedia. They appear to have at least come to a reasonable understanding that The Post-Noachian Flood Volcano Theory, where animals were sent hurtling through the air is for now, off the page.

Credit: craig_watson on Pixabay.
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This article on the aftermath of The Great Flood was originally published in December 2013 and updated on 29 June 2019. Good to see the folks at Conservapedia revisit their original theories.