Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly

"Comment: evidently not the Ark." — the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, on its radiocarbon date for Fernand Navarra's wood, 1965¹

"Based on the fact that Mount Ararat rests upon volcanic strata on top of sediments laid down by the Flood, we can be rather confident that the Ark will never be found on this mountain." — Andrew Snelling, young-earth geologist, Answers in Genesis, 2017²

Summary

There is no evidence that Noah's Ark lies on Mount Ararat, the 5,137-metre volcano that Turks call Ağrı Dağı and Armenians call Masis.  Seventy years of searching have produced stories, photographs of shadows, and wood from the early Middle Ages.  The strongest case against the mountain comes from young-earth creationists themselves, whose geologists build the volcano after the Flood.  Genesis 8:4 never named this peak.  It says the Ark rested on "the mountains of Ararat," a region, and the parent article, Searching for Noah's Ark, covers what that phrase means.

Eight findings, stated first.

1. The tradition is medieval. Armenian writers first put the Ark on Masis in the eleventh or twelfth century. Before that, Christian and Muslim tradition put it on Cudi Dağı, about 320 kilometres to the south, which has its own article, Mount Cudi and the Older Tradition.³⁴ By 1829, when Friedrich Parrot made the first recorded ascent, Armenians held it as an article of faith that the Ark was on the summit and that no one could reach it. Parrot reached the top and reported snow. In 1840 an earthquake shook rock and ice off the walls of the Ahora gorge and buried the monastery and village that kept the tradition.
2. The sightings trace to legend and fiction. The 1916 Russian aviator story first appeared in a Los Angeles magazine around 1940. The man who supplied its raw material wrote that "About 95% is pure fiction," and the editor later told an Ark researcher that it "had no historical reality."⁵⁶ Haji Yearam's tale is a 1952 letter recalling a conversation from 1915. George Hagopian's boyhood visits were told decades later, and his films were "confiscated." No sighting has produced an object, a photograph, or a place anyone could find again.
3. Navarra's wood is early medieval. Fernand Navarra cut a beam out of the ice in 1955. A Madrid forestry institute put it at "around 5,000 years" from its colour, density and degree of lignite, which is not a dating method. Five laboratories later radiocarbon-dated it, and the three that agree give 1,190 to 1,230 radiocarbon years, about AD 700. The British National Physical Laboratory's 1965 entry ends: "evidently not the Ark."¹³ Wood recovered in 1969 dates about the same.
4. The numbers are not close. Young-earth chronologies put the Flood between 2256 and 3386 BC, so Ark wood should give at least about 3,800 radiocarbon years. The young-earth RATE group's own model of pre-Flood carbon predicts about 54,000. To turn either expectation into the measured 1,200 years, at least three-fifths of the carbon in the wood would have to be modern contamination, and 86% on the RATE model.⁷
5. The Ararat Anomaly is rock and ice as far as anyone can show. US Air Force photographs taken in 1949 and released in 1995, and later satellite images, show a dark ridge at about 4,660 metres. Porcher Taylor, who pried the photos loose, says only that it is "either something geological or perhaps something of Biblical proportions."⁸ Farouk El-Baz, a remote-sensing scientist at Boston University, calls it "a ledge of rock in partial shadow."⁹ No one has stood on it and reported back.
6. The 2010 Hong Kong claim failed on its own carbon dates. Noah's Ark Ministries International announced a 4,800-year-old wooden structure above 12,000 feet. Three of its four wood samples dated modern, about 120 to 135 years, and 610 years. The fourth, run by one unnamed laboratory, gave 4,269 to 4,800 years without the standard checks. Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis, who had the data, told the team the samples "could not have come from the Ark."¹⁰¹¹ Randall Price, who had worked with the team, charged that Kurdish workers planted the wood. The team denies it, and neither side has published its evidence in full.
7. Ararat is a volcano that young-earth geology builds after the Flood. Its lavas lie on fossil-bearing beds that every Flood model counts as Flood sediment.¹² It erupted after people lived on its slopes: about 2450 BC on the conventional scale, about 550 BC, and in 1840.¹³ Its summit ice feeds glaciers that move 1 to 10 metres a year, and moving ice grinds up what it carries.⁵¹⁴
8. The mountain has been searched hard. Turkey closed it at times, in 1975 and 1987 among others, but James Irwin, the Institute for Creation Research and many others searched it on foot and from the air through the 1980s, and satellites have covered it since. The ice cap lost 29% of its area between 1976 and 2011, uncovering ground equal to about 780 Ark footprints.¹⁵¹⁶ Nothing ship-shaped has melted out.

Everything that has been checked has failed.  The young-earth position does not need the Ark to be on this mountain, and its best geologists say it is not.  The site that has the oldest texts behind it is Cudi Dağı;  the boat-shaped landform south of Ararat is a separate question, treated in The Durupınar Formation.

Part 1: How the Ark came to this mountain

A medieval identification

Genesis 8:4 puts the Ark "upon the mountains of Ararat."  Ararat is the Hebrew form of Urartu, a kingdom and a region of mountains, and the verse does not name a peak.  The parent article handles the text.  This article asks a narrower question:  when did people start saying the Ark was on this particular mountain, and what has the mountain yielded?

The answer from every historian who has traced it is the eleventh or twelfth century.  Davis Young, a geologist writing a history of the church and the Flood, puts it this way:  "Only toward the eleventh and twelfth centuries did the focus begin to shift toward the huge volcanic cone Agri Dagh, the modern Mount Ararat in easternmost Turkey, as the final resting place."⁴  Lloyd Bailey, an Old Testament scholar, reports the conclusion of the Armenian specialist Heinrich Hübschmann:  "the older Armenian writers all understood the Gordian (Qardu) Mountains to be the ark's landing place.  This was true of Faustus as well.  Only after the eleventh /twelfth century C.E. was the location shifted to Agri Dagi."³  Carol Hill adds that the identification became "a fairly well established tradition" only "by the end of the fourteenth century AD."¹⁷  Creationist researchers agree.  Bill Crouse and Steven Anderson, writing in Journal of Creation in 2024, quote the Encyclopaedia of Islam:  "The tradition that Masik [Agri Dagh] was the mountain on which the ark rested only begins to find a place in Armenian literature in the 11th and 12th centuries."⁶

These dates are not fully independent, since Hill cites Young.  But no one has produced an earlier text that names Masis as the landing place, while the southern tradition is more than a thousand years older:  Berossus, writing about 280 BC, already put the Ark in "the mountains of the Korduaians of Armenia."¹⁷  The sibling article on Cudi Dağı covers that older tradition.

By the late thirteenth century the new identification had reached Western travellers.  Marco Polo wrote:  "And you must know that it is in this country of Armenia that the Ark of Noah exists on the top of a certain great mountain".¹⁸

Parrot's ascent, 1829

The first person known to have stood on the summit was Friedrich Parrot, "Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Dorpat," as his title page put it.¹⁹  He described the belief he met at the foot of the mountain:  "for all the Armenians are firmly persuaded that Noah's ark remains to this very day on the top of Ararat, and that, in order to ensure its preservation, no human being is allowed to approach it."¹⁹  The authority was the legend of Jacob of Nisibis, a monk who tried to climb the mountain, kept waking up lower than he had fallen asleep, and was finally given a piece of the Ark by an angel.  Parrot said the church had turned the folk belief "into an article of faith".¹⁹

Parrot's party reached the top "about a quarter past three on the 27th of September (9th of October), 1829".¹⁹  He found a dome of ice and snow and no wood.  He was not hostile to the tradition.  He suggested that a snowfield between the two summit knobs "may be supposed to be the very spot on which Noah's ark rested, if the summit itself be assumed as the scene of that event," and that "on the top of Ararat there may be easily a sufficient depth of ice to cover the ark, which was only thirty ells high."¹⁹  That idea, the Ark preserved under the summit ice, is the one every later searcher has chased.

The 1840 catastrophe

The monastery of St. Hakob, which Parrot used as his base, stood above the village of Akhuri (Arguri) at the mouth of the great Ahora gorge on the north face.  It kept the local Noah traditions, and until 1840 the villagers showed visitors "an ancient vine stock, still bearing grapes," said to have been "planted by the patriarch's hands."²⁰  On the evening of 2 July 1840 both were destroyed.  James Bryce, who visited in 1876, gave the account he collected:  "Towards sunset in the evening of the 20th of June 1840 (old style), the sudden shock of an earthquake, accompanied by a subterranean roar, and followed by a terrific blast of wind, threw down the houses of Arghuri, and at the same moment detached enormous masses of rock with their superjacent ice from the cliffs that surround the chasm.  A shower of falling rocks overwhelmed in an instant the village, the monastery, and a Kurdish encampment on the pastures above:  Not a soul survived to tell the tale."²⁰  Four days later the fallen snow and ice melted into a torrent of mud that ran out onto the Aras plain.

Whether this was an eruption is disputed, and the dispute matters only a little here.  The appendix to the English edition of Parrot says that "no mention of an eruption" is made by the native historians.¹⁹  Bryce wrote that reports of an eruption had "no foundation : the dust which accompanied the great rock fall was probably mistaken for smoke".²⁰  The Smithsonian's volcano database, following a 2002 study by Arkadi Karakhanian and colleagues, lists it as a phreatic, steam-driven eruption with a pyroclastic flow, and Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis calls it "A steam-blast eruption and volcanic ash flow".²¹³  Either way, the monastery and village that kept the mountain's Noah traditions were buried, and the gorge where later searchers hunted for the Ark was reshaped within living memory.

Part 2: The sightings, traced to print

The modern search rests on eyewitnesses.  Rick Lanser of the Associates for Biblical Research, who has made the fullest recent case for Ararat, argues from the biblical rule of "two or three" witnesses.²¹  Rex Geissler, another Ararat researcher, admits the dependence plainly:  "if it were not for the purported sightings and its name, Mount Ararat would have very little to link it with the biblical account."²²  So the sightings deserve a close look.  The standard collection is Tim LaHaye and John Morris's The Ark on Ararat (1976), written by two believers in the Ark on the mountain.  Its introduction is candid:  "Much of the evidence is rather frustrating.  Ephemeral in nature, it seems to tease the researcher, promising to provide substantive information but never fulfilling its promise."⁵

Haji Yearam

The story:  in 1856 three foreign scientists, "vile men who did not believe the Bible," hired an Armenian boy and his father to guide them to the Ark, found it in the ice, tried to destroy it, and swore each other to secrecy.⁵  The only source is a letter by Harold Williams "addressed 'To Whom It May Concern' and dated 1952, almost 100 years after the actual sighting took place."⁵  Williams had heard the story from the old man in California in 1915 and 1916, and he wrote it down 36 years later:  "Here is the story as accurately as I can now give it from memory, checked by the memory of Mrs. Williams who also heard it."⁵  He said he later saw a newspaper report of one scientist's deathbed confession.  LaHaye and Morris admit that "researchers have been trying to locate the clippings or other corroboration of the London deathbed confession.  However, the search has not yet borne fruit."⁵

Roskovitsky and the Russian expedition

LaHaye and Morris call it "the most widely circulated Ark story of all."⁵  A Russian airman flying over Ararat in 1916 sees a huge ship half-sunk in a frozen lake;  soldiers reach it, and wood and a report go to the Czar;  both vanish in the Revolution.⁶  LaHaye and Morris say it "was first published in 1940 in The New Eden, a Los Angeles magazine, Floyd Gurley, Editor."⁵  Crouse and Anderson give the March 1939 issue.⁶  The source of its raw material, Benjamin Franklin Allen of the Society for the Study of Creation, the Deluge, and Related Science, wrote in 1945 that his neighbour had "concocted a masterpiece of fiction and invention".  "About 95% is pure fiction, but the meager details from the former soldiers could be true.  The name Roskovitsky and the person are pure fiction, as are all parts but the few I have given here."⁵  In 1989 Gurley himself told Bill Crouse, by phone and in a letter, "that the story had no historical reality."⁶

LaHaye and Morris kept a "kernel of truth that, in time, was substantiated by authoritative witnesses," meaning second-hand reports from relatives of Russian soldiers.⁵  None of those reports names a document, a photograph or a place that has been found.

George Hagopian

Hagopian, an Armenian who grew up near Lake Van, said he twice visited the Ark with his uncle as a boy, in 1908 and 1910.²³  "Born before the turn of the century, Georgie Hagopian was only ten years old when he first saw the Ark."⁵  He described a whole ship on a cliff edge, its wood like stone.  He went back to Turkey in 1922 with an American photographer, and LaHaye and Morris report that years later "Hagopian showed the movies and photographs to officials in Washington, only to have them confiscated, and the whole affair hushed up."⁵  His account reached print more than sixty years after the events, from one witness, with the only evidence reported lost.  Anne Habermehl, in a review of the search for the 2008 International Conference on Creationism, notes that petrified wood is itself a problem:  timber sitting on a mountainside is not soaked in mineral-rich water, and the objects in such sightings more likely "consist of basaltic rock, which can look surprisingly like wood grain."²²

The base rate

Bill Crouse, who edited the Ararat Report newsletter and ran down several of these witnesses himself, sums up:  "In almost every case, where the claims could be investigated, they have been shown to be troublesome, contradictory, and stretching credulity.  With good research and detective work, most have been proven to be untrue."⁶  The table counts the named stories that the Ark literature itself has traced.

Of eight, three are admitted, confessed or exposed fabrications, three rest on evidence reported lost, one changed in the telling, and the one physical object dates from the early Middle Ages.  None has produced a photograph, an object of Flood age, or a location that a second party could find.²³⁶⁶⁶  That is the base rate against which any new sighting should be weighed.  Crouse and Anderson add a mechanism:  Ararat is covered in basalt, and "given the right shadows and lighting, large blocks of basalt can easily be mistaken for a ship-like object."⁶  A climber reached the best-known "black spot" near the summit and found "just a rock outcrop!"⁶

Part 3: Navarra's wood

Fernand Navarra's beam is the only physical object ever brought down from Ararat as Ark wood, so it gets the longest treatment here.

The find

Navarra was a "French industrialist," as Christianity Today described him, who made three attempts on the mountain in 1952, 1953 and 1955.²⁴  LaHaye and Morris tell the result:  "The summer of 1955 finally yielded positive results.  For Navarra, many years of investigation culminated when his icy fingers gripped a hand-hewn beam far beneath the ice cap.  Accompanied only by his eleven-year-old son, Raphael, Navarra explored this time without the official sanction of the government."⁵  Navarra says he broke through a ceiling of ice with his pickaxe and found a beam in water.  "I tried to pull out the whole beam, but couldn't."  He cut along the grain "until I split off a piece about five feet long."⁵  On the way, he writes, "I decided to cut the beam in three pieces and distribute them among our sacks."²⁵  Later he cut smaller pieces again to send to laboratories.

Where exactly he found it has never been settled.  LaHaye and Morris print three heights:  13,750 feet in Navarra's narrative and 14,000 feet in a caption, against "close to 12,760 feet" measured by altimeter in 1970 by William Farrand, a geologist from the Arctic Institute of North America on the SEARCH Foundation team.⁵⁵  They write that Navarra "has displayed a disturbing tendency to describe his location at any time in such vague and even contradictory terms that even Ararat veterans cannot pinpoint and trace his steps."⁵  In 1969 Navarra guided the SEARCH Foundation back to the area, and its team dug out more pieces of wood, though at a different spot from the one he had shown them a year earlier.⁵

"Five thousand years," and how it was reached

In 1956 Navarra sent pieces to institutes in Spain, France and Egypt.  None of them used a dating method.  The Forestry Institute in Madrid weighed the wood and found it "a hard and compact wood with a density of 1.100," against a normal density "between 0.800 and 0.850," read the extra density as "the lignitization phase of fossilization," and concluded:²⁵  "Consequently, one can suppose the age of the wood sample given varies around 5,000 years."²⁶  The prehistory institute at Bordeaux wrote only that the wood had fossilized "during a period dating to a remote antiquity."²⁶  At the Cairo Museum an expert looked at a piece and "estimated it to be 4,000 to 6,000 years old";  Navarra's own supporters David Balsiger and Charles Sellier concede that "No actual scientific testing was done at the Cairo Museum."²⁶  The institutes could not even agree on the tree.  The radiocarbon laboratory that later dated it described "Oak wood of uncertain species (variously identified as Q. pedunculata, Q. Leucobalanus, Q. castanifolia or Q. cerris)".¹  How fast oak darkens and densifies depends on the species and on the water it lies in, so these estimates have nothing to calibrate them.

One further "radiocarbon" figure circulates from Navarra's own book, Noah's Ark:  I Touched It (1974).  An appendix prints a letter from an unnamed writer who is "very happy to read that the exact age of the wood which has been dated by the 'radiocarbon' process was 4484 years old," followed by a table:  Flood in 2472 BC, plus 1955 years to the find, plus 57 years of growth before the Flood.²⁵  That is Bible arithmetic.  No laboratory, sample number or error is given.

What the laboratories found

The wood was then dated by radiocarbon, by five laboratories on the 1955 wood and two on the 1969 wood.  Lloyd Bailey collected the results and telephoned the laboratory directors to confirm them.³

The National Physical Laboratory's entry in the journal Radiocarbon is the earliest published laboratory date.  It reads, in part:  "Oak wood of uncertain species ... from very large timber structure under ice at 14,000 ft ASL on NW face of Mount Ararat ... Coll. between 1950 and 1955 by Fernand Navarra ... Comment: evidently not the Ark."¹  Bailey's verdict on the spread:  "of the four verified tests on the 1955 wood, three are in very close agreement.  The maximum difference is only forty years".³  The Geochron outlier ran on half the wood its counter needed, and a beam has centuries of rings, so pieces cut from different parts of one log can differ.³  Even Navarra's own publishers admitted in 1974 that "One sample subjected to carbon-14 dating has been assigned an age of only 1,500 years," and asked for "such factors as contamination" to be evaluated.²⁵

How defenders answered

The Ark's defenders did not dispute the numbers.  They disputed the method.  LaHaye and Morris objected that "The wood was handled by many people for several years before testing," that it had soaked in water, and that cosmic rays are stronger at altitude.⁵  Balsiger and Sellier concluded that "Carbon 14 just isn't a suitable method for determining the age of Navarra's wood."²⁶  Others, Bailey reports, explained the dates "as the result of repairs to the ark!"³

These answers can be priced.  Wood felled before the Flood is older than the Flood.  Young-earth chronologies place the Flood between 2256 and 3386 BC, according to Chris Hardy and Robert Carter's survey of the biblical numbers.²⁷  Through the tree-ring calibration curve, 2256 BC corresponds to a radiocarbon age of about 3,800 years.  The young-earth RATE project's own model predicts much older ages still.  John Baumgardner argues that the pre-Flood biosphere held far more carbon, so that "organisms with 0.2 pMC 14C 4500 years ago would display a level of 0.12 pMC today," which is a radiocarbon age of about 54,000 years.²⁸²²  To make wood of either age read 1,200 years, modern carbon has to be added.  At the latest young-earth Flood date, 63% of the carbon in the sample would have to be modern;  on the RATE model, 86%.  Even with carbon from the 1960s bomb tests, which is richer in carbon-14 than any natural source, the shares are 27% and 57%.⁷  Laboratories wash wood in hot acid and alkali before dating it for exactly this reason.  Snelling, defending the method against the Hong Kong team in 2011, put it bluntly:  "Any contamination due to field handling during collection and laboratory processing of samples can be effectively ruled out, due to the harsh chemical pre-treatment of samples in the laboratory".¹⁰  And three laboratories on two continents got the same answer.  Riverside dated the lignin alone, the solid cell-wall fraction that contamination reaches least.²⁹  Handling, soaking and altitude do not add half the carbon in a beam.

Was the wood planted?

Fraud was alleged early.  LaHaye and Morris report that "J. A. de Riquier, Navarra's friend and climbing partner in 1952, has accused Navarra of attempting to purchase a piece of timber from a very ancient structure in a nearby city in 1952, intimating that the wood was not found on Ararat at all."⁵  They print a statement from Sahap Atalay, a Turkish army officer who had climbed with Navarra in 1952:  "I found out later that Navarra had given his son a piece of wood and had taken pictures and movies of him."⁵  But they reject the charge:  "To the authors these accusations do not appear conclusive.  The 1969 find indicates that.  The wood was found by several different men whose honesty is above question."⁵  Crouse and Anderson, writing in 2024, list Navarra among "Three proven hoaxes," on the strength of René Noorbergen's 1974 book The Ark File.⁶  Snelling's 2017 article says expedition members claimed Navarra "purchased the wood in town and carried it up the mountain," but the footnote attached to that sentence points to a 2010 news story about the Hong Kong claim, not about Navarra.²

The radiocarbon dates make the fraud question less important than it looks.  Whether Navarra found the wood in the ice or carried it there, it grew in the seventh or eighth century AD.  Rainer Berger, who ran the UCLA date, suggested it might come from a medieval shrine.²⁹  Habermehl points out that Armenians built monasteries in the tenth century, that tenth-century Arab geographers describe forests on the mountain, and that structures built in the Medieval Warm Period could have been overrun by the ice of the Little Ice Age.²²  LaHaye and Morris themselves conceded that "Navarra did not find the Ark as described by so many witnesses," though they kept hope that "He may indeed have found wood from the Ark that has broken off".⁵  The dates rule that hope out.

Part 4: The search since 1970, and the Ararat Anomaly

Expeditions and closures

Access to the mountain has opened and closed with Turkish politics.  The SEARCH Foundation's 1970 team was turned back when "the main SEARCH party below ran into problems with the Turkish government".⁵  In January 1975 "a special Turkish Cabinet-level session decided to deny all such requests for the summer of 1975," citing unrest among the Kurds of the Ararat area.³⁰  John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research led 13 expeditions to the mountain between 1971 and 1990.³¹  The Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin led several in the 1980s.  Crouse summed them up:  Irwin and his associates "combed most of the mountain on foot.  Still not satisfied, they surveyed and photographed the mountain from various aircraft.  While the efforts of Irwin and others have received much media attention, there is still no tangible evidence of an ark on Ararat."³²  In 1986 Irwin and his companion Bob Cornuke were arrested on suspicion of espionage.³³  In 1987 a directive from the Prime Minister mandated "that no exploration of any sort would be allowed on Mt. Ararat," and a 20-kilometre buffer zone along the Russian and Iranian borders limited flights.³⁴³⁴  In 2011 Turkey moved climbing permits from the national intelligence service to the provincial governors, under a 2006 protocol for military zones.³⁵

So the mountain has not been open to free excavation.  But it has been walked, flown over and photographed for half a century.  In 1989 the Mount Ararat Research Foundation hired a plane with a mapping camera and had a NASA volcanologist study 900 overlapping stereo transparencies.  "Nothing unnatural was identified."⁶  Edmond Holroyd, a creationist remote-sensing specialist, told Habermehl in 2008 that his work had brought him round:  "I am also coming into agreement that Mt. Ararat is not the mountain on which Noah's Ark landed.  The Ark is not outside the ice on the surface, in spite of so many false alarm reports of seeing it.  My radar analysis shows that it is not under the ice either."²²

The Ararat Anomaly

The best-known modern candidate is a dark, elongated feature near the north-west corner of the summit plateau.  It was first photographed "During a routine U.S. Air Force mission over Turkey on June, 17, 1949".³⁶  The film was classified.  Porcher Taylor, who teaches at the University of Richmond, pressed the government for it, and in 1995 the Defense Intelligence Agency released the frames:  "six photo frames" according to Insight magazine in 2000, "five 1949 U.S. Air Force aerial photos" according to Taylor in 2014.³⁶⁸  In 2000 Insight paid Space Imaging to point its Ikonos satellite, with one-metre resolution, at the site, and DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite imaged it in February 2003.³⁶⁸

What the feature is depends on whom one asks.  Insight sent the images to a panel:  "four of the experts say it could be man-made; two believe it's a rock; and one calls the evidence inconclusive."³⁶  The man-made side rested on shape.  Clifford Paiva, a retired Navy imagery physicist, thought it "more likely a man-made structure because of the 90-degree angles," and even suggested it could be the broken remains of a village.³⁶  The natural side included Farouk El-Baz, director of Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing.  He said in 2000, "There is no anomaly.  The displayed features are part of the natural setting that might characterize any high-elevation peak," and in 2006, "The feature that has been interpreted as the 'Ararat Anomaly' is to me a ledge of rock in partial shadow, with varied thickness of snow and ice cover."³⁶⁹

Taylor himself has never claimed it is the Ark.  In 2006:  "if it is the remains of something manmade and potentially nautical, then it's potentially something of biblical proportions."⁹  In 2014 he hoped better images would turn it into "a known entity, either something geological or perhaps something of Biblical proportions."⁸  John Morris of ICR wrote that the 1949 photos showed an elongated object "but photo quality was insufficient to be certain."³⁷  Snelling's 2017 article says "geologists say the object simply looks like a rock outcropping that only appears Ark-like when snow and ice melt in the right spots."²

Three facts weigh against it, and they can be stated in numbers.  First, its size is not agreed.  Insight and Morris give "534 feet in length," while the imagery analyst Rod Franz measured "1,015 feet (309 meters) across," more than twice the 137 metres of an Ark of 300 cubits at 18 inches.³⁷⁹  Second, the feature sits "at 15,300 feet (4,663 meters) on the northwest corner of Mt. Ararat, and is nearly submerged in glacial ice."⁹  That is on the ice cap, in ice that flows.  Third, the satellites can see an object this size.  An Ark of 300 by 50 cubits spans about 137 by 23 one-metre Ikonos pixels, or 225 by 37 QuickBird pixels.¹⁶  One of Insight's panel, Gomez, held that one-metre resolution was not enough to make a final determination of what the feature is;  that is fair for detail, but a hull of that size would show its outline.³⁶  The anomaly has been photographed from the air and from orbit for more than seventy years, in good melt seasons and bad, and no image has resolved planks, a deck, or a hull.  The fair conclusion is that it is unidentified on the ground and natural on the evidence, and that a single climb could settle it.

Part 5: The 2010 Hong Kong claim

The claim, in the team's words

On 25 April 2010 Noah's Ark Ministries International, a Hong Kong evangelical group, held a press conference with its partner The Media Evangelism.  The Christian Science Monitor reported that they were "99 percent sure" that wood "found at above 12,000-feet elevation and dated as 4,800 years old" came from the Ark.³¹  Team member Yeung Wing-cheung was careful:  "We are not saying that we are 100 percent certain that what we found is Noah's Ark.  No one has ever seen the ark, no one knows what it looks like.  ...  We are only 99 percent certain that it is Noah's Ark based on historical accounts, including the Bible and local beliefs of the people in the area, as well as carbon dating."³¹  The Monitor summarised the team's description as planks "some 20 meters long" in "wooden rooms and hallways buried in the ice atop Mount Ararat."³⁸  Answering the charge that the wood was carried up, team coordinator Clara Wei said:  "You can hire horses to carry bags, but they cannot balance themselves with 20-meter-long timber."  She would not name the university in Tehran that dated the wood.³⁸³⁸  Asked what else the structure could be, she said:  "So up to now I believe this is the most probable explanation.  We don't have another explanation."³⁸

The carbon dates

Before the press conference the team sent its radiocarbon results to Andrew Snelling, then director of research at Answers in Genesis, hoping for his support.  He published them in November 2011, "exactly as it was given to me on April 20, 2010."¹⁰

The laboratories were not named.  Three of the four samples grew within the last 650 years, and one grew after the bomb tests.  Sample D, the source of the "4,800 years," was run by one laboratory that, Snelling writes, "did not follow standard procedures and did not measure the δ13C value or report a ± error margin."¹⁰¹¹  Snelling says he told the team on a Skype call on 20 April 2010, five days before the announcement, that  "the carbon-14 tests of their wood samples strongly indicated that their wood samples could not have come from the Ark."¹¹

Snelling's reasoning deserves to be stated in his own terms, because it shows the young-earth expectation for real Ark wood.  He dates the Flood to "about 2,300–2,400 BC, or 4,300–4,400 years ago," argues that radiocarbon ages before about 1000 BC must be recalibrated for a changing atmosphere, and concludes that "a wood sample from the Ark must carbon-14 date older than 4,800 years."¹¹¹¹  On that test, samples A, B and C fail by thousands of years.  Sample D, at 4,269 to 4,800, falls at or below the threshold he set, and it rests on one unnamed laboratory without the standard checks.  On Baumgardner's RATE model it fails by about 50,000 radiocarbon years.

The fraud charge, in Price's words

Randall Price, an archaeologist at Liberty University, had worked with the Chinese team.  Within days of the press conference a letter from him circulated among Ark researchers.  He wrote that what follows "is my opinion based on what I have seen and heard (from others who claim to have been eyewitnesses or know the exact details)."  His charge:  "In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut, the guide used by the Chinese, are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area (where the photos were originally taken) at the Mt. Ararat site."  He said more wood was placed in a cave in 2009, that he had "the photos of the inside of the so-called Ark (that show cobwebs in the corners of rafters – something just not possible in these conditions)," and that a Kurdish partner in Doğubayazıt "has all of the facts about the location, the men who planted the wood, and even the truck that transported it."  He ended:  "I am sorry to have to report that this is apparently a fake".³⁹  To the Monitor he put it conditionally:  "proper analysis may show this to be a hoax and negatively reflect how gullible Christians can be."³¹

Others in the Ark community split.  John Morris of ICR, a consultant to the team since 2005, declined to attend the press conference:  "I'm a scientist.  I need to have good evidence.  As of right now, there is not."  But he doubted fraud:  "I think it would be highly unlikely that anybody could carry wood up.  I can't comprehend that.  I don't think there's fraud involved.  But that is a possibility."³¹  Crouse and Anderson call it "A more recent and probable hoax," centred on the guide "Parasut (real name: Ahmet Ertuğrul)".⁶

Neither side has published what would settle it.  Price's photographs and his Kurdish partner's evidence have not appeared, and his letter is hearsay by his own description.  The team has never named Laboratory 3, released the structure's location, or let independent scientists sample it.  But the fraud question does not have to be settled to judge the claim.  The team's own carbon dates put three samples in the last 650 years, and the fourth does not meet the threshold Answers in Genesis set for Ark wood.

Part 6: The volcano, the ice, and what the mountain does to wood

What the young-earth geologists say

The strongest objection to an Ark on Mount Ararat comes from young-earth geology, not from its critics.  Andrew Snelling, who "holds a PhD in geology from the University of Sydney" and wrote the two-volume young-earth geology Earth's Catastrophic Past, put it this way in 2009:²  "Mt. Ararat is a volcanic mountain whose lavas cover fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks.  Obviously, if these fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks beneath Mt. Ararat are a product of the Genesis Flood, then Mt. Ararat was not there prior to the Flood."¹²  In 2017 he spelled out the sequence for Answers in Genesis.  Marine sediment lies at the bottom.  A lava plateau covering more than 50,000 square kilometres lies on that, with freshwater lake beds and fish between its flows.  The two cones of Greater and Lesser Ararat were built on top of the plateau last.  His conclusion:  "Mount Ararat is thus a post-Flood volcano, which continued to erupt, most recently less than 200 years ago."²  He added that "we can be rather confident that the Ark will never be found on this mountain."²

Snelling is not alone.  Anne Habermehl's review of the Ark search at the 2008 International Conference on Creationism quoted John Baumgardner, the physicist who built the catastrophic plate tectonics model.  Baumgardner reads the oldest dated Ararat lava, 1.7 million years on the conventional scale, as falling in the Ice Age after the Flood once RATE's accelerated decay is applied, and concludes that "Mt. Ararat is a volcanic mountain that formed in its entirety after the Flood had ended."²²  Habermehl quotes Snelling in a private letter:  "There is agreement among the leading creation geologists that it (Ararat) is a post-Flood mountain that sits on late Flood/post-Flood limestone."²²  Bill Crouse and Steven Anderson, two creationist Ark researchers, made geology the second of their five reasons to give up on the mountain in Journal of Creation in 2024.⁶  Carol Hill, an old-earth geologist, makes the same argument from the geologic map of Turkey:  the Ararat volcanoes cut across "Devonian, Permo-Carboniferous, Cretaceous, Eocene, and Miocene sedimentary rock," so the mountain "must be younger than this rock."¹⁷

The point does not depend on radiometric dates.  It is superposition.  Lava that lies on top of a fossil-bearing bed is younger than the bed.  Every young-earth model counts those beds as Flood sediment.  So every young-earth model has to build the cone after the beds were laid down.

The dissent, in its own words

A minority of creationists still argue for Ararat, and they deserve a fair hearing.  Clifford Burdick, who studied the mountain in 1966, "believed that the original Mount Ararat had already existed before the Flood, perhaps even from the time of creation, and that lava layers extruded over it during the Flood had raised it to a maximum height of 6,100 m."²²  Max Hunter, an Australian geologist, asked in 2003 that the mountain "should not be discounted as a submarine volcanic construct, formed beneath the waters of the Genesis Flood, unless it can be proven that none of those volcanic textures that are indicative of a subaqueous origin of lavas, volcaniclastics and pyroclastics, or interstratified sediments, exist."⁴⁰  Rick Lanser of the Associates for Biblical Research made the fullest case in 2011.  He argues that the dated rocks may not be the oldest, that the red tuffs in the Ahora Gorge formed "under more hydrous conditions" and might have erupted through Flood water, and that a cone of this shape can grow under the sea.  His model:  "The initial eruption was probably underwater, and over the course of the year that the Flood lasted, the Ararat volcano continued to rise, from a combination of both crustal uplift and magma extrusion, until it was high enough for a cooler part of the mountain to snag the Ark."²¹

Lanser's case has two weaknesses, and both are in his own article.  First, his chief ground is testimony.  He weighs the sightings by the biblical "two or three witnesses" rule and asks geology to make room for them.  Part 2 showed what the sightings are worth.  Second, the test he needs has not been run.  The Oxford volcanologist he wrote to, David Pyle, agreed that an undersea volcano can have the same shape as a land one, but added:  "the products of submarine volcanism are quite different from the products of sub-aerial volcanism, and they can be quite readily distinguished on the basis of the nature of their deposits."²¹  No one on the pro-Ararat side has published a sample of pillow lava, hyaloclastite or water-chilled glass from the upper cone.  Burdick's pillow lava was never confirmed.  Habermehl and Crouse both note that pillows also form when lava meets ice, which this mountain has always carried.²²⁶

Even if Lanser were right, it would not help an Ark on today's summit.  On his model the Ark grounds on a young cone in the middle of the Flood year.  Snelling's account of the mountain gives about 820 metres of lava added in the "climactic" phase and more in the flank eruptions after it.²  Snelling made the consequence plain in 2010:  an Ark that landed where Mount Ararat now stands "would eventually have been buried under thousands of feet of hot burning lavas."⁴¹  On either young-earth account, the surface a modern climber walks on is younger than the Flood.

The mountain kept erupting

The Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program lists three confirmed eruptions in the last 5,000 years.¹³  The first, dated 2450 BC give or take fifty years on the conventional scale, sent pyroclastic flows down the north-west flank;  the record says "pyroclastic-flow deposits overlie early Bronze Age artifacts and human remains."  The second, about 550 BC, produced lava flows.  The third came on 2 July 1840, the event in Part 1, which the database records as an explosion, pyroclastic flow, avalanche and mudflow on the upper northern flank.  The Early Bronze Age falls after the Flood on every young-earth chronology, so on young-earth terms the mountain was still erupting after people had moved back onto its slopes.  An Ark parked high on the mountain would have sat through those events.

Could wood survive up there at all?

Here the young-earth side has a fair point that critics often miss.  Wood can last thousands of years in ice.  In Norway, melting ice patches above 1,400 metres are giving up wooden arrows, skis and tools;  one arrow shaft from the Langfonne patch dates to 2031–1879 BC.¹⁴  So "wood cannot last 4,000 years on a mountain" is not true as stated.

But the same Norwegian study says why it works there and not on a glacier.  The finds come "from stationary (negligible basal movement) ice patches rather than glaciers, because the continuous movement of the latter destroys objects at the base of the ice."¹⁴  Ararat's summit ice is an ice cap feeding outlet glaciers.  Crouse and Anderson say "almost all of the ice fields on Mt Ararat are in the form of moving glaciers, which would have the action of crushing and pulverizing any wooden object the size of the Ark."⁶  Snelling says the same:  "glaciers advance and recede.  Such movement would tear the Ark to shreds."²

The ice on Ararat has been measured moving.  In 1970 William Farrand found the boreholes SEARCH had drilled in the Parrot Glacier the year before "deformed into ellipses by the continuing movement of the ice," and judged that "the total ice movement must lie between one and ten meters per year."⁵  At that rate ice carries an object 4 to 43 kilometres in 4,300 years.  The whole ice cap covered about 8.4 square kilometres in 1976, a patch a few kilometres across.¹⁶  Wood that entered the moving ice at the Flood would have reached a glacier snout and melted out thousands of years ago.  The ice moves more slowly near the summit dome, which is why Edmond Holroyd searched two summit hollows "where the ice would remain stationary for thousands of years."  He found nothing there that could be "interpreted as Noah's Ark or a large fragment thereof."²²

The ice is also shrinking, which turns the question into a test.  Mehmet Akif Sarıkaya measured the ice cap from satellite images and found it "has lost 29% of its surface area at a rate of -0.07km 2 a -1" between 1976 and 2011.¹⁵  That is about 2.4 square kilometres of ground uncovered in 35 years, or about 780 times the footprint of an Ark of 300 by 50 cubits.¹⁶  A Turkish commando officer told Crouse "he has taken his men all over the mountain in maneuvers and has never seen anything resembling the Ark."⁶  Nothing ship-shaped has melted out of the ground the ice has given up.

Objections and responses

1. "The Bible says the Ark landed on Ararat, and this is Mount Ararat."  Genesis says "the mountains of Ararat," plural, which is the land of Urartu.  The name Mount Ararat was attached to Masis in the Middle Ages, and the identification of this peak with the landing is no older than the eleventh century (Part 1).  The parent article, Searching for Noah's Ark, deals with the text.  Nothing in Genesis requires the highest peak in the region, and leading young-earth writers say so.

2. "Dozens of independent eyewitnesses cannot all be wrong."  This is Lanser's "two or three witnesses" argument.  But the witnesses are not independent of the tradition they confirm, and the ones that have been traced fall apart:  admitted fiction, confessed fabrication, evidence lost in every case, and the one object dated to the Middle Ages (Part 2).  The test for testimony is corroboration, and in seventy years none of these stories has led a second party to the thing described.

3. "Radiocarbon is unreliable, and Navarra's wood was contaminated."  Young-earth theory does not predict a young date for Ark wood.  It predicts a very old one:  RATE's model gives about 54,000 radiocarbon years, and Snelling sets 4,800 as a minimum.  Contamination that turns a pre-Flood beam into an AD 700 date has to supply 63% to 86% of the carbon, and three laboratories that pretreated and, in one case, isolated the lignin got the same answer within forty years (Part 3).  The site's radiocarbon article covers the method itself.

4. "The wood could be a fragment of the Ark that broke off and was carried down by the glacier."  This was LaHaye and Morris's hope.  The dates rule it out.  A fragment of the Ark is as old as the Ark.  The wood grew in the seventh or eighth century AD.

5. "Navarra did not plant the wood;  the 1969 team dug it up themselves."  That may be true, and it does not help.  If the wood was in the ice, it is medieval wood in the ice.  Medieval structures on the mountain are plausible:  Armenians revered it, built monasteries in the region from the tenth century, and Arab geographers describe forest on its slopes (Part 3).

6. "The Ararat Anomaly has never been explained, and Turkey has kept people away from it."  It has not been visited and reported on, which is a fair complaint.  But the images are good enough to resolve a 137-metre hull, the feature's reported length varies by a factor of two, and it sits in moving ice.  The named remote-sensing geologist calls it rock, and its own champion says it may be "something geological" (Part 4).

7. "Mount Ararat could have formed under the Flood waters, so the Ark could have grounded on it."  This is the view of Burdick, Hunter and Lanser.  It is not the view of Snelling, Baumgardner, Habermehl, Crouse or Hill, and it rests on a test nobody has run:  rocks from the upper cone with textures that show they erupted under water.  Even if it were right, the cone grew by hundreds of metres after the Ark would have grounded, and Snelling notes that an Ark there would be "buried under thousands of feet of hot burning lavas" (Part 6).

8. "Wood cannot survive 4,000 years at that altitude, so the critics are overstating."  The critics who say this are wrong, and the creationist side is right to object.  Wooden arrows have survived 4,000 years in Norwegian ice patches.  But those survive in ice that does not move.  Ararat's ice moves, and the stationary hollows near the summit have been searched by radar (Part 6).

9. "The Hong Kong team's 20-metre timbers could not have been carried up by horses."  Clara Wei's point is reasonable on its face, and Price's evidence for planting has not been published.  The claim still fails without settling the fraud question.  The team's own carbon dates put three samples in the last 650 years and the fourth below Answers in Genesis's minimum for Ark wood, from an unnamed laboratory (Part 5).

10. "Accepting all this concedes the Flood to the skeptic."  It does not.  The young-earth position needs an Ark that landed in the mountains of Urartu.  It does not need one on this peak, and its geologists build the peak after the Flood.  What it concedes is that the most publicised line of Ark evidence is worthless, which Answers in Genesis has said in print and Journal of Creation has published.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Taylor and Berger 1980 was not read. R. E. Taylor and Rainer Berger's note "The date of 'Noah's Ark'" (Antiquity 54, 1980) is behind a paywall. The laboratory figures here come from Bailey 1989, who confirmed them by telephone with the laboratory directors, and from the National Physical Laboratory's own 1965 list. The Teledyne result has never been published.
2. The first printing of the Roskovitsky story is not settled. LaHaye and Morris give New Eden, 1940; Crouse and Anderson give the March 1939 issue; Violet Cummings reports an earlier version reprinted in an Australian magazine "as a reprint from Answers, an English weekly," and writes that "It is believed that the Roskovitsky story appeared as early as 1935."⁴²⁴² None of these earlier printings was seen.
3. William of Rubruck. Davis Young and James Bryce say the thirteenth-century friar tells the Jacob legend at Ararat. W. W. Rockhill's 1900 English translation of Rubruck has no such passage. The Latin was not checked, so Rubruck is not cited here as a witness.
4. Was 1840 an eruption? Nineteenth-century writers said no; the Smithsonian database, following Karakhanian and colleagues in 2002, says a phreatic eruption. R. A. Haroutiunian (2006) disputed some of Karakhanian's historical eruptions. Neither paper was read. The answer does not affect the verdict.
5. Where Navarra's wood came from. The radiocarbon dates are secure; the find site is not. Three heights and at least three spots are recorded. The wood may come from a medieval structure on the mountain, from lower down, or from elsewhere.
6. The anomaly has no ground truth. Its length is given as 534 feet and as 1,015 feet, and the 1949 frame count as five or six. A single climb to 4,660 metres would settle what it is.
7. Price's evidence. His photographs and his Kurdish partner's file have not been published, and his letter's timeline is confused: it says the 2008 expedition "never happened" while placing him with the team that year. The team, for its part, has not named the laboratory behind its one old date.
8. A sourcing error at Answers in Genesis. Snelling's 2017 article supports its statement that Navarra bought his wood in town with a footnote to a 2010 news story about the Hong Kong claim. The purchase allegation itself goes back to de Riquier in 1952, as LaHaye and Morris report.

Verdict

There is no evidence that Noah's Ark lies on Mount Ararat.  The identification of this peak is medieval.  The sightings that have been traced are fiction, confession or lost evidence.  The one object brought down, Navarra's beam, grew around AD 700, and the National Physical Laboratory said so in 1965.  The Ararat Anomaly is unvisited but reads as a ridge of rock and ice.  The 2010 Hong Kong samples dated young by the team's own results.  And the leading young-earth geologists, Snelling and Baumgardner among them, place the whole volcano after the Flood, on top of the Flood's own sediments.

The skeptic should take two things from this.  First, the failure of the Ararat search is not a failure of the Flood account, because the account never named this mountain.  Second, the people who did the most to expose that failure were creationists:  Crouse running down witnesses, Snelling publishing the Hong Kong dates, Habermehl reviewing the search for a creationist conference.  The site with ancient texts behind it is Cudi Dağı, treated in Mount Cudi and the Older Tradition.  Other candidates are in Other Proposed Landing Sites.

Sources