Searching for Noah's Ark

Genesis 8:4 names a region, the mountains of Urartu, not a peak, so the Bible requires no particular site and no surviving Ark. No candidate has produced identified wood, sampled independently and published. Every wood date published in full is under 1,700 radiocarbon years; every result said to favour an Ark lacked a named laboratory or a full report.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"But it should be repeated that the biblical text does not give a precise location." — Gordon Wenham, on Genesis 8:4, 19871

"Comment: evidently not the Ark." — the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, on its radiocarbon date for Fernand Navarra's wood, 19652

Summary

No one has found Noah's Ark.  Since 1955 searchers have worked four regions of Turkey and Iran.  They have brought back eyewitness stories that trace to fiction, photographs of rock and ice, a boat-shaped landform, and wood that grew in the Middle Ages or later.  That record costs Genesis nothing, because Genesis never names a peak and never says the Ark survived.  This page sets out what the text locates, what a real find would have to produce, and the pattern that runs through every candidate.  Each site has its own article, summarised in Parts 4 to 7.  The promoters as people, Ron Wyatt among them, belong to Bad Actors and False Discoveries.  The Ark's size and cargo belong to Noah's Ark:  The Logistics.

  1. The text names a region (Part 1). Genesis 8:4 says the Ark rested "upon the mountains of Ararat," a plural.3 Ararat is the Hebrew name of Urartu. An Assyrian king first names it in the thirteenth century BC, as eight mountain countries, and it later became a kingdom around Lake Van, at its height in the eighth and seventh centuries BC.45 The Hebrew can mean "one of the mountains of Ararat," and Gordon Wenham's commentary concludes that "the biblical text does not give a precise location."11 The single volcano now called Mount Ararat was first named as the landing place in the eleventh or twelfth century AD.6 So the text requires no particular site, and the search is optional for the Bible's truth.
  2. What a find must produce (Part 2). Four things: wood identified under the microscope, an unbroken chain of custody from the ground to the laboratory, sampling by people who did not fund the expedition, and full results published where others can check them. Each standard has decided at least one case.
  3. The pattern (Part 3). At every candidate site, the result said to favour the Ark is the one never released in full: Navarra's "5,000 years" from wood density, the one old Hong Kong date from an unnamed laboratory, Cornuke's unnamed petrified-wood test, the Durupınar radar and soil claims, and Bender's unnamed Cudi laboratory. Where a sample went to a laboratory and the full result was printed, the wood was at most about 1,700 radiocarbon years old. A young-earth geologist sets the bar at "older than 4,800 years."7
  4. The Durupınar formation (Part 4) is a natural landform in an active earthflow. The cores drilled into it in 1988 held "no evidence for wood, petrified or otherwise,"8 and creationists debunked it first.
  5. Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly (Part 5). The tradition is medieval, the sightings trace to fiction, Navarra's wood grew in the eighth century AD, the Anomaly is unvisited rock and ice, and young-earth geologists build the volcano after the Flood.
  6. Mount Cudi (Part 6) is where the oldest tradition put the Ark, from Berossus about 280 BC onward. That tradition is mostly a reading of Genesis, and nothing found on the mountain is from a ship.
  7. The other sites (Part 7). Cornuke's Iranian outcrop is rock, and the wood his team brought down dates to AD 1440-1650. The rest offer nothing to test. Boat-shaped landforms recur around Ararat, so a boat shape is not evidence.

Verdict:  no candidate site has produced evidence of the Ark that survives checking, and the shape of the record, in which the decisive sample is announced and then not released, is reason to expect the next announcement to fail the same way.  The failure is not a failure of Genesis.  The verse claims a region, and the region is real.

Part 1: What the text locates

Genesis 8:4

The verse reads, in the King James Version:  "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat."3  The Hebrew is ʿal hārê ʾărārāṭ, "on the mountains of Ararat," and the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon lists it under the proper name of a territory, not of a mountain.9  The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the third century BC, keeps both the plural and the name:  epi ta orē ta Ararat.10

The plural does not mean the Ark straddled several peaks.  Wenham's translation note gives the sense "one of the mountains of Ararat," a Hebrew plural used for an indefinite singular.1  Either way the verse names a range, not a summit.  His comment on the verse:  "'On the mountains of Ararat' does not mean on a mountain called Ararat, but on the mountains in the area called Ararat."1  Carol Hill, a geologist who has written on the landing site, reads it the same way:  the Bible "merely alludes to a region or range of mountains where the ark came to rest."5

Ararat everywhere else in the Bible is a country

The name occurs three more times, and each time it is a land or a kingdom.9

  1. 2 Kings 19:37 and Isaiah 37:38. After the Assyrian king Sennacherib is murdered, his sons "escaped into the land of Armenia," as the King James Version renders the Hebrew "land of Ararat."3 The translators of 1611 read the word as the name of a country.
  2. Jeremiah 51:27. Babylon's enemies are summoned: "the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz."3 Ararat stands beside two other peoples of the northern highlands.

Hill draws the plain conclusion:  "In biblical times, 'Ararat' was actually the name of a province (not a mountain)."5  The lexicon places the district "between the river Araxes & lakes Van & Oroomiah," the modern Lake Urmia, and adds that Jeremiah may use it in a wider sense.9

Urartu in the Assyrian records

The Assyrians called the same land Uruaṭri, later Urartu.  The name first appears in an inscription of Shalmaneser I, whom the Assyriologist Daniel Luckenbill dated about 1280 BC.  The king writes:  "the land of Uruadri rebelled," and "I mobilized my armies, went up against their mighty mountain fastnesses.  The lands of Himme, Uadkun, Bargun, Salua, Halila, Luha, Nilipahri, Zingun,—eight countries with their forces, I conquered."4  At its first appearance, then, Urartu is not a mountain.  It is a group of eight mountain countries.

Later the name passed to a kingdom centred on Lake Van.  Hill summarises its extent at its height:  "In its 'heyday' (eighth–seventh centuries BC), the kingdom of Urartu stretched from the eastern bank of the upper Euphrates River to the western shore of Lake Urmia, and from the mountain passes of northern Iraq to the Caucasus Mountains."  The volcano now called Mount Ararat lay at the kingdom's northern edge, and "It was not until the reign of Menua (810–786 BC) that the area of Mount Ararat became a part of Urartu."5  The region the verse names is several hundred kilometres across.  Every candidate in Turkey treated on this site, from Ağrı Dağı in the north to Cudi Dağı on the Tigris, lies inside it or on its edge.

The ancient translations kept it a region

The Jewish and Christian translators who rendered Genesis into Aramaic and Syriac did not look for a peak either.  They replaced "Ararat" with the name of the district their readers knew.  Targum Onqelos reads ʿal ṭūrê qardū, "on the mountains of Qardu,"11 and the Peshitta, the Syriac Bible, also reads Qardu.12  The Targum of the Prophets does the same at Isaiah 37:38, where Sennacherib's sons "escaped into the land of Kardu."11  Qardu is Gordyene, the hill country on the upper Tigris where Cudi Dağı stands.  The article Mount Cudi and the Older Tradition traces these renderings in full.

When the Ark moved to one peak

The single volcano that Armenians call Masis and Turks call Ağrı Dağı entered the story late.  Davis Young, a geologist writing a history of the church and the Flood:  "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."6  Lloyd Bailey reports the Armenian specialist Heinrich Hübschmann's finding that "the older Armenian writers all understood the Gordian (Qardu) Mountains to be the ark's landing place."12  Hill adds that the identification became "a fairly well established tradition" only "by the end of the fourteenth century AD."5  The verse itself names no mountain.  The peak's modern English name carries the medieval identification.

What follows

Three things follow from the text, and the rest of this page depends on them.

  1. No single candidate is required. Genesis 8:4 is satisfied by a landing anywhere in the mountains of Urartu. A creationist need not defend Ağrı Dağı, Durupınar or Cudi, and the failure of any of them leaves the verse untouched.
  2. The search is optional. Nothing in Genesis says the Ark survived. Andrew Snelling, a young-earth geologist, wrote while debunking Durupınar that "the Bible in no way says that Noah’s Ark would be preserved as a witness to future generations."13 A find would be evidence for Genesis. Its absence is weak evidence against it, because timber exposed to weather or moving ice rarely lasts four thousand years. The article The Durupınar Formation prices that decay.
  3. The text does constrain the Flood account in one way. It puts the landing in the highlands where the Tigris and Euphrates rise, not on the Mesopotamian plain. That is a problem for reading the Flood as a river flood of the plain, which would carry a boat south toward the Gulf. The article The Flood Narrative treats that argument.

Part 2: What a real find would have to produce

A claimed find is a claim about an object.  Four checks turn the object into evidence.  None of them is exotic.  They are what any archaeological wood is held to, and each has already decided a case in this search.

  1. Wood, identified under the microscope. A thin section cut from a sample shows whether it has wood cells, and usually which genus. Without one, rock passes for timber. Ron Wyatt called samples from Durupınar parts of the "ribs, decks, posts, and walls of the ark." The geologist Lorence Collins cut thin sections of twelve of them: "Eleven were volcanic basalt and one was volcanic andesite."14 At Takht-e Suleiman in Iran, the geologists of the Institute for Creation Research had only photographs. John Morris wrote that "it was not possible to be certain of its identity," and that the "beams" were most likely "thinly bedded silicified sandstone which has been mistaken for wood grain."15 Navarra's beam from Ağrı Dağı passed this test. The National Physical Laboratory catalogued it as "Oak wood of uncertain species."2 Passing it showed only that the beam was wood.
  2. An unbroken chain of custody. A sample is evidence of a site only if it can be traced from the ground to the laboratory: who took it, where, when, and who held it until it was tested. Two Ağrı Dağı cases turned on this, and neither could be settled after the fact. Navarra's climbing partner J. A. de Riquier accused him "of attempting to purchase a piece of timber from a very ancient structure in a nearby city in 1952." LaHaye and Morris, who believed in an Ark on the mountain, wrote that "these accusations do not appear conclusive."1616 In 2010 Randall Price, an archaeologist who had worked with the Hong Kong team, wrote that Kurdish workers "are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area." He called this "my opinion based on what I have seen and heard."17 Neither charge has been proved or disproved in print. A documented custody record would have closed both questions at once.
  3. Sampling by people who did not fund the expedition. The most informative results in this record came from people who had come to test the claim and had a stake in the answer going the other way. John Baumgardner, a creationist geophysicist, drilled Durupınar in 1988 and reported "no evidence for wood, petrified or otherwise."8 Andrew Snelling, a young-earth geologist, received the Hong Kong team's dates and told them "their wood samples could not have come from the Ark."7 The results announced in favour of an Ark came from the groups that organised and promoted each search: the Hong Kong ministry, Bob Cornuke's BASE Institute, and the Noah's Ark Scans group, whose Andrew Jones served "as Vice President" of the 2026 Durupınar project.18 That does not make their results wrong. It means their samples have to be taken, split and tested by someone else before anyone outside the team can rely on them.
  4. Full results, published where others can check them. The single most decisive document in the whole search is one entry in a 1965 date list in the journal Radiocarbon: a sample number, NPL-61, a description of the wood, the result, 1,190 ± 90 radiocarbon years, and "Comment: evidently not the Ark."2 Anyone can read it and argue with it. Against it stand the claims that never reached that form: a radar firm's report captioned "NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CANNOT BE DETERMINED,"19 a 2023 Turkish university dating known only from a newspaper interview,20 and the unnamed laboratories of Part 3.

What the wood would have to show

A sample that passes all four checks still has to fit the Flood.  Young-earth chronologies put the Flood between 2256 and 3386 BC.21  On the conventional calibration even the latest of those dates corresponds to about 3,800 radiocarbon years.  The young-earth RATE model of pre-Flood carbon predicts much older apparent ages:  organisms that lived 4,500 years ago "would display a level of 0.12 pMC today," which is about 54,000 radiocarbon years.2223  Snelling's working bar is simpler:  Ark wood "must carbon-14 date older than 4,800 years."7  By the young-earth side's own reckoning, a sample that dates younger than this is not from the Ark, however it was found.

Part 3: The pattern across sites

The four candidate articles were researched separately.  Set side by side, they show the same sequence at every site.  A result that would favour the Ark is announced.  The sample, the laboratory or the report behind it is not released.  Where a sample did reach a laboratory and the full result was printed, the wood was centuries old, not millennia.

site and claim the result announced what was never released what the released data show
Ağrı Dağı: Navarra's beam, 1955 A Madrid forestry institute: "one can suppose the age of the wood sample given varies around 5,000 years," from its density, which is not a dating method.24 A letter Navarra printed in 1974 gave "4484 years" by "radiocarbon."25 Any laboratory, sample number or error behind the "4484 years"; the figure is Bible arithmetic Five laboratories radiocarbon-dated the wood: 1,190 to 1,690 radiocarbon years.12 The published entry ends "evidently not the Ark."2
Ağrı Dağı: the Hong Kong structure, 2010 A wooden structure about 4,800 years old The names of the laboratories. The one old result, sample D, came from a laboratory that "did not follow standard procedures and did not measure the δ13C value or report a ± error margin."7 Three of four samples: modern, 120 to 135 years, and 610 years.26
Takht-e Suleiman, Iran: Cornuke's outcrop, 2006 "Some samples tested by an independent lab showed signs of petrified wood."27 The laboratory, the tests and the report. The team has "never revealed who did the testing, what tests were performed, or released the actual lab report."28 A foraminifer in a rock sample from the object.27 Wood dated by Beta Analytic to 355-565 years, which Cornuke said "would not be fragments directly from Noah’s ark."29
Durupınar: Ron Wyatt's samples, from 1977 A sample from a crack in the mound held 4.95% carbon, "consistent with the presence of prior living matter, such as decayed or petrified wood"30 Any identification of the material. The laboratory "only analysed for three elements-calcium, iron and carbon" and "was adamant that they were not asked to give an opinion on what the object was."13 Thin sections of twelve "wood" samples: "Eleven were volcanic basalt and one was volcanic andesite."14
Durupınar: Noah's Ark Scans, 2019-2026 Radar "right angles"; soil with "approximately three times more organic material,"31 or organic matter "twice as high" and potassium "about 40 percent higher"32 Any peer-reviewed paper, the soil data, and the 2023 university dating report. Results of the 2026 cores are promised for the winter of 2026-2027. The radar firm's own caption: "NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CANNOT BE DETERMINED."19 The official who announced the 2023 dating: with it "it is not possible to say the ship is here."20 The 1988 cores: "no evidence for wood, petrified or otherwise."8
Cudi Dağı: Friedrich Bender's sample, 1953 Wood "dated with the 14 C method; they are 6500 years old, i.e. pre-Sumerian."33 The laboratory, the sample number and the error, in any text that could be read. Bender collected it without "detailed records of the geologic-Quaternary stratigraphy."33 Nothing beyond the reported figure. Cudi's leading modern advocate calls the finds "of course inconclusive."34

What the pattern shows

  1. Every wood date published in full is under 1,700 radiocarbon years. That covers six results on Navarra's wood from five laboratories, three Hong Kong samples, and Cornuke's Beta Analytic date. The oldest, 1,690 years on half of one sample, reaches about a third of Snelling's 4,800-year bar.
  2. Every result said to favour an Ark lacks a named laboratory or a full report. The Madrid density estimate, the "4484 years" letter, Hong Kong sample D, Cornuke's petrified-wood test, Wyatt's assays, the Noah's Ark Scans soil and radar, and Bender's date all fall in this group. There is no exception in the record the four articles assembled.
  3. The favourable results came from the people who ran the search. The unfavourable ones came from laboratories with no stake in the answer and from creationists who had come to check. That is the third standard of Part 2, seen from the other side.

A result that is never released cannot be shown wrong, and for the same reason it cannot count as evidence.  Two cases are still open, and they are the ones to watch.  Bender's date is old, and at face value it clears Snelling's bar, but it has no laboratory behind it in any readable text, and his 1956 publication, not yet obtained, may name one.  The 2026 Durupınar cores were taken by a team led by a Turkish university archaeologist, with Andrew Jones as vice-president, and their results are due.  If either produces identified, dated wood from a named laboratory, the pattern breaks, and this page should be rewritten.

Part 4: The Durupınar formation

The Durupınar Formation judges the boat-shaped mound 29.5 km south of the summit of Ağrı Dağı, and finds it a natural landform:  a firmer mass of rock and rock-rich mud in the active Telçeker earthflow, streamlined by the debris moving past it.  Its outline can even be made to fit a collapsed Ark, if the sides are assumed to have fallen outward, so the shape settles nothing.  The material does.  Every sample sectioned as wood was volcanic rock, and at least two of the three 1988 cores near the centre line reached rock within 5 m.  Baumgardner concluded that the shape came from "mud flowing around a narrow ridge-shaped body of rock."8  The case against the site was built by creationists, and Answers in Genesis now files both of its Durupınar articles under "Arguments to Avoid."35  The radar and soil claims made since 2019 are unpublished, and the 2026 cores are an open and fair test.

Part 5: Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly

Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly finds no evidence that the Ark lies on the 5,137 m volcano.  The identification is medieval, as Part 1 shows.  The sightings trace to legend and admitted fiction:  the man who supplied the raw material for the 1916 Russian aviator story wrote that "About 95% is pure fiction."16  Navarra's wood grew in the eighth century AD.  The Ararat Anomaly is unvisited, and the remote-sensing scientist Farouk El-Baz reads it as "a ledge of rock in partial shadow."36  The 2010 Hong Kong samples dated young by the team's own results.  And the young-earth geologists put the volcano after the Flood, on top of Flood sediment.  Snelling:  "we can be rather confident that the Ark will never be found on this mountain."37

Part 6: Mount Cudi and the older tradition

Mount Cudi and the Older Tradition finds that Cudi Dağı, a ridge above the Tigris near Cizre, is the right answer to the question "where did the oldest tradition put the Ark?"  Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing about 280 BC, said "there is still some part of this ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans,"38 and the Aramaic and Syriac Bibles read Ararat as Qardu (Part 1).  But most of the early witnesses place the mountain of Genesis 8:4 in the nearest district they knew, rather than remember the site.  Bill Crouse, Cudi's leading modern advocate, says of the Targums that "There is a definite tendency to update place names."34  Berossus, the one witness outside the biblical line, attests a relic shown in his own day, not an object anyone can now examine.  The summit holds a recent Muslim shrine over a probable Nestorian monastery, the reliefs at the foot of the ridge are Sennacherib's, and Bender's wood sample has no checkable report.

Part 7: Other proposed landing sites

Other Proposed Landing Sites covers the rest.  Bob Cornuke's Takht-e Suleiman in Iran is the only other candidate with a physical case, and it fails on its own laboratory result:  creationist geologists read the "beams" as rock, a sample held a marine microfossil, and the wood dated to AD 1440-1650 (Part 3).  The other candidates, from Kuh-e Alvand and the Dasht-e Kavir to Arabia and Apamea in Phrygia, rest on readings of a verse, a word or a town's name, and offer nothing to test.  The same article shows that the boat shape is common near Ararat.  A Turkish Air Force photograph shows "three similar boat-shapes in the mudflow material on the footslopes of nearby Lesser Mount Ararat,"13 Don Patton photographed "at least three nearby outcrops of similar shape and material" beside Durupınar,39 and a cluster of five lies on Greater Ararat's south-west slope about 21 km north of Durupınar, the largest about 650 m long.  Anne Habermehl, reviewing the search for a creationist conference, says Durupınar drew attention only because "it is about the right length."40  Of the eleven candidates that article tabulates, the three whose physical evidence was tested have all failed, and Cudi's one sample, as Part 6 says, has never been reported in a form that can be checked.

Objections and responses

  1. "The Bible says Mount Ararat, so the Ark must be there." It says "the mountains of Ararat," a plural, and Ararat is a land and a kingdom in every other verse that names it (Part 1). The peak was identified with the landing in the eleventh or twelfth century AD. A reader who insists on Ağrı Dağı is claiming more than the verse does.
  2. "Seventy years without an Ark show the Flood never happened." Genesis never says the Ark survived, and timber exposed to weather or moving ice rarely lasts four thousand years. So the failure of the search is weak evidence against the Flood. The skeptic's stronger case is elsewhere, in the rocks and in the narrative itself, and the site treats it there, beginning with The Flood Narrative. This page claims only that the search neither confirms nor refutes Genesis.
  3. "The laboratories are biased, and radiocarbon is unreliable anyway." The bar in Part 2 is the young-earth side's own: Snelling's 4,800 years, and a RATE model that predicts far older apparent ages, not younger. To turn real Ark wood into the measured 1,200 years, most of its carbon would have to be modern contamination; the Ararat article computes 63 to 86 percent. Five laboratories agree within a few centuries of one another, and the one that published its result in full had no stake in the answer.
  4. "An unreleased result might still be right." It might. Part 3 says so, and names the two open cases. But a result no one can examine cannot be counted as evidence by anyone outside the team, and the four standards of Part 2 cost little to meet. A team that holds a decisive sample can end the argument by releasing it.
  5. "The creationist critics were protecting their reputations, not following the evidence." Their reasons are cores, thin sections and radiocarbon dates, which anyone can check, and several of them went to the sites hoping for an Ark. Baumgardner drilled Durupınar himself. Snelling had the Hong Kong data before the announcement. A motive does not change a measurement.
  6. "Cudi is the oldest tradition, so it must be the place." The oldest tradition is mostly a reading of Genesis 8:4 by people who knew the nearest district (Part 6). It shows where readers looked, not where the Ark is. Cudi lies inside the region the verse names, so Genesis is satisfied whether or not the tradition is right.
  7. "A low landing site such as Cudi means the Flood was local." The height of the landing place does not measure the depth of the water. The text puts the grounding in the seventh month and says only that later, "in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen."3 That fits a grounding on high ground while other summits were still covered, wherever the ground was. On the young-earth geologists' own reading, the 5,137 m volcano did not yet exist (Part 5). Whether the Flood was local is argued from the whole narrative in The Flood Narrative, not from the landing site.
  8. "Old wood would prove the Ark." It would not, alone. A radiocarbon date older than 4,800 years shows old wood, not a ship. A find would also need a hull's construction, a context that rules out a later building or natural burial, and the four standards of Part 2. Bender's figure, even taken at face value, is a date on asphalt-bound wood with no recorded stratigraphy.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. The two open tests. The laboratory results from the 2026 Durupınar cores are promised for the winter of 2026-2027. Bender's 1956 publication, which should name his laboratory and sample, was not obtained by the Cudi article. Either could change Part 3.
  2. The Hong Kong custody question. Price's charge rests, by his own account, on what others told him, and the team's evidence for its site has not been published in full. Neither side's case could be checked.
  3. The Assyrian evidence is read from a 1926 translation. Luckenbill's rendering "Uruadri" and his date of about 1280 BC for Shalmaneser I were not checked against the modern edition of the inscription. The kingdom's extent and the date Menua took the Ararat district come from Hill's summary, not from the Urartian inscriptions themselves.
  4. The first use of "Ararat" as the peak's own name was not traced separately from the first claim that the Ark landed on it.
  5. The histories of the shift to Ağrı Dağı are not fully independent. Hill cites Young, and Bailey reports Hübschmann. No one has produced an earlier text that puts the Ark on that peak, but the agreement of these three is one line of evidence, not three.
  6. The five boat-shaped forms on Greater Ararat were located from satellite imagery. Their material, lava or debris, has not been checked on the ground.

Verdict

Genesis 8:4 names a region, the mountains of Urartu, and that region is real and well attested in Assyrian records from the thirteenth century BC.  The text names no peak, and it never says the Ark survived.  So no candidate is required by the Bible, and no failed candidate counts against it.

As evidence, the sites fail one by one and fail the same way.  Durupınar is a landform.  Ağrı Dağı's tradition is medieval and its wood is early medieval.  Cudi holds the oldest tradition and no checkable object.  The other sites offer rock or nothing.  Across all of them, every wood date published in full is under 1,700 radiocarbon years, and every result said to favour an Ark came without a named laboratory or a full report.  The people who did most to establish this were creationists.  Until a find meets the four standards of Part 2, the right response to the next announcement is to ask for the sample.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Wenham, Gordon J.  “Genesis 1–15.”  Word Biblical Commentary 1.  Word Books, Waco.  1987.  A commentary on the Hebrew text of Genesis 1-15 by an evangelical Old Testament scholar.  Its notes on Genesis 8:4 cover the grammar of the plural and the location of Ararat.

    1. 1a.

      Page 153, section Notes, 4.c:  “Or “one of the mountains of Ararat.” Here the pl “mountains” may be used for an indefinite sg”.  Wenham cites Gesenius' Hebrew grammar and two parallel uses of the plural, Exodus 21:22 and Deuteronomy 17:5. ↩ ↩

    2. 1b.

      Pages 184–185:  ““On the mountains of Ararat” does not mean on a mountain called Ararat, but on the mountains in the area called Ararat. Ararat is the Hebrew term for Urartu, a kingdom north of Assyria (2 Kgs 19:37; Isa 37:38; Jer 51:27) later called Armenia, now part of eastern Turkey, southern Russia, and northwestern Iran.”  Page 185:  “But it should be repeated that the biblical text does not give a precise location.” ↩ ↩ ↩

  2. 2.

    Callow, W. J. et al.  “National Physical Laboratory Radiocarbon Measurements III.”  Radiocarbon 7:156–161.  1965.  A routine date list from the British National Physical Laboratory's radiocarbon unit, giving each sample's laboratory number, description, age and comment.  Entry NPL-61 is the earliest published laboratory date on Navarra's wood.

    1. 2a.

      Page 161:  “Oak wood of uncertain species (variously identified as Q. pedunculata, Q. Leucobalanus,”.  “or Q. cerris) from very large timber structure under ice at 14,000 ft ASL on NW face of Mount Ararat”.  The species omitted between the two parts is Q. castanifolia, which the scan breaks across a space.  “Coll. between 1950 and 1955 by Fernand Navarra”.  “Comment: evidently not the Ark.”  The result is 1190 ± 90, A.D. 760, on the 5568-year half-life. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  3. 3.

    The King James Version of the Bible.  Project Gutenberg.  2024.  The 1611 English translation in Project Gutenberg's electronic text, used for the wording of the four verses that name Ararat.

    1. 3a.

      Verse Genesis 8:4:  “And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” ↩ ↩

    2. 3b.

      Verse 2 Kings 19:37:  “they escaped into the land of Armenia”.  Verse Isaiah 37:38:  “they escaped into the land of Armenia”.  Verse Jeremiah 51:27:  “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz”. ↩ ↩

    3. 3c.

      Verse Genesis 8:5:  “And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.” ↩

  4. 4.

    Luckenbill, Daniel David.  Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, vol. I: Historical Records of Assyria from the Earliest Times to Sargon.  University of Chicago Press, Chicago.  1926.  English translations of the Assyrian royal inscriptions from the earliest kings to Sargon II, by a University of Chicago Assyriologist.  Used here for the first appearance of the name Urartu, in an inscription of Shalmaneser I.

    1. 4a.

      Page 38:  “At the time of his accession the whole land of Uruadri (Urartu, Armenia, the name occurs here for the first time) revolted.”  Luckenbill's introduction, which dates Shalmaneser I to about 1280 BC.  Page 39:  “At that time, at the beginning of my priesthood, the land of Uruadri rebelled”.  “I mobilized my armies, went up against their mighty mountain fastnesses. The lands of Himme, Uadkun, Bargun, Salua, Halila, Luha, Nilipahri, Zingun,—eight countries with their forces, I conquered.”  The king's own inscription. ↩ ↩

  5. 5.

    Hill, Carol A.  “The Noachian Flood: Universal or Local?”  Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 54(3):170–183.  2002.  A geologist's case for a regional Flood in Mesopotamia, written for the American Scientific Affiliation.  Its section on the landing site sets out what Ararat and Urartu meant in the biblical period, how far the kingdom reached, and when the tradition moved to Ağrı Dağı.  Hill argues for a local Flood;  her history of the name does not depend on that argument.

    1. 5a.

      Page 176:  “In its “heyday” (eighth–seventh centuries BC), the kingdom of Urartu stretched from the eastern bank of the upper Euphrates River to the western shore of Lake Urmia, and from the mountain passes of northern Iraq to the Caucasus Mountains”.  “It was not until the reign of Menua (810–786 BC) that the area of Mount Ararat became a part of Urartu.” ↩ ↩

    2. 5b.

      Page 175:  “it merely alludes to a region or range of mountains where the ark came to rest”.  “In biblical times, “Ararat” was actually the name of a province (not a mountain)”. ↩ ↩

    3. 5c.

      Page 175:  “Only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD did the focus of investigators begin to shift toward Mount Ararat as the ark's final resting place”.  “and only by the end of the fourteenth century AD does it seem to have become a fairly well established tradition.”  Hill's footnote 29, which falls between the two parts, cites Young 1995, p. 34. ↩

  6. 6.

    Young, Davis A.  The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church's Response to Extrabiblical Evidence.  Eerdmans, Grand Rapids.  1995.  A history of how Christian writers from the church fathers to the twentieth century handled the Flood, by a Christian geologist who is not a young-earth creationist.  It surveys the landing-site traditions and dates the turn to Ağrı Dağı.

    1. 6a.

      Page 34:  “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.” ↩ ↩

  7. 7.

    Snelling, Andrew A.  A Response to the Accusations of Noah's Ark Ministries International and The Media Evangelism by Emphasizing Truths They Have Ignored about My Carbon-14 Dating Report.  Answers in Genesis.  Dec 6, 2011.  Snelling's reply after the team accused him of misusing their data.  It gives the timeline of his contact with them and his reasons for the age an Ark sample should show.

    1. 7a.

      “It is for these reasons I stated in my article that a wood sample from the Ark must carbon-14 date older than 4,800 years.” ↩ ↩

    2. 7b.

      “During that Skype conference call I then told those Noah’s Ark Ministries International and The Media Evangelism representatives that the carbon-14 tests of their wood samples strongly indicated that their wood samples could not have come from the Ark.” ↩

    3. 7c.

      “The fourth wood sample, sample D, was only tested at Laboratory 3, but this laboratory did not follow standard procedures and did not measure the δ13C value or report a ± error margin.” ↩

  8. 8.

    Baumgardner, John R.  Durupinar Core Drilling Locations and Results.  1988.  Baumgardner's own statements about the 1988 drilling, gathered in one document:  his newsletter of 19 August 1988 and emails of 1999, 2014 and 2021.  The compilation was made and posted by the Noah's Ark Scans group, which promotes the site, so it is not edited to favour the natural reading.

    1. 8a.

      Section newsletter, 19 August 1988:  “Between July 28th and August 7th we succeeded, praise God, in drilling four holes to a depth of ten meters and recovered reasonably good cores from each of the holes.”  “these occurrences of limonite are of special interest because they could represent the rusted remains of metallic iron objects.”  “A final observation concerning the core samples was the absence- apart from the limonite nodules- of possible evidence for man-made structure. There was, for example, no evidence for wood, petrified or otherwise.” ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 8b.

      Section email, 20 March 1999:  “These data together revealed the existence of a ridge of basement rock aligned along the centerline of the almond shaped formation. On the upper end of the site it was covered by about 15 feet of the mudflow alluvium. Along much of the lower two-thirds of the site, the ridge of basement rock was actually exposed at the surface. The conclusion of this work was that the unusual shape of the formation was the result, not of mud in the mudslide flowing around Noah's Ark, but rather of mud flowing around a narrow ridge-shaped body of rock.” ↩

  9. 9.

    Brown, Francis et al.  A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament.  Clarendon Press, Oxford.  1906.  The standard Hebrew-English lexicon of the Old Testament for most of the twentieth century, giving each word's senses and every passage where it occurs.  Its entry for Ararat lists the four verses and places the district.

    1. 9a.

      Section entry אֲרָרָט:  “n.pr. terr. Ararat ( Assyrian Urarṭu”.  “a district in Eastern Armenia between the river Araxes & lakes Van & Oroomiah”.  “used perhaps with wider ref. Je 51:27”.  n.pr. terr. means proper name of a territory.  The entry counts Genesis 8:4 and three more uses, and gives the phrases as הָרֵי א׳, mountains of Ararat, in Genesis 8:4 and as the land of Ararat in 2 Kings 19:37 and Isaiah 37:38. ↩ ↩ ↩

  10. 10.

    Center for Computer Analysis of Texts, University of Pennsylvania.  CATSS morphologically analysed Septuagint, Genesis (Rahlfs text).  n.d.  A word-by-word tagged edition of the Greek Old Testament, cited for the Septuagint's wording of Genesis 8:4.

    1. 10a.

      Verse Genesis 8:4:  “ἐπὶ τὰ ὄρη τὰ Αραρατ”.  The edition writes the Greek in Beta Code (E)PI\ TA\ O)/RH TA\ *ARARAT);  it is transliterated here. ↩

  11. 11.

    Sefaria.  Targum Onqelos and Targum Jonathan on Genesis 8:4, and Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 37:38.  2026.  Retrieved Oct 18, 2026.  The Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible used in the synagogue.  Onqelos is the official Babylonian Targum of the Torah;  Pseudo-Jonathan is a later, expanded Targum of the Torah;  Jonathan to the Prophets covers Isaiah.  English for Pseudo-Jonathan and Isaiah is from the nineteenth-century translations Sefaria serves.

    1. 11a.

      Verse Genesis 8:4:  “עַל טוּרֵי קַרְדּוּ”.  on the mountains of Qardu, Onqelos. ↩

    2. 11b.

      Verse Isaiah 37:38:  “escaped into the land of Kardu”.  Targum Jonathan to the Prophets.  The Hebrew has the land of Ararat. ↩

  12. 12.

    Bailey, Lloyd R.  Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition.  University of South Carolina Press, Columbia.  1989.  A scholarly study of the Noah story in the Bible, the ancient Near East and later tradition by an Old Testament scholar.  Its chapter on Navarra's wood lists every radiocarbon result, with laboratory numbers where they were published, and Bailey confirmed the unpublished ones by telephone with the laboratory directors.

    1. 12a.

      Page 76:  “Hübschmann's conclusion is that 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.”  Bailey is summarising Heinrich Hübschmann's study of the Armenian sources. ↩

    2. 12b.

      Pages 65–66:  “Several of the Targums (Aramaic translations of the Bible: Onkelos, Neofiti, and Pseudo-Jonathan A) render the “mountains of Ararat” in Genesis 8:4 as the “mountains of Qardu(n),” as do the Peshitta (the Syriac Bible) and other Jewish and Christian sources.” ↩

    3. 12c.

      Pages 95–96:  “Five laboratories have subjected Navarra's wood to radiocarbon (C14) analysis”.  The 1955 wood:  National Physical Laboratory 1,190 ± 90, UCLA 1,230 ± 60, UC Riverside 1,210 ± 90, Geochron 1,690 ± 120 on an inadequate sample, Teledyne unpublished.  The 1969 wood:  University of Pennsylvania 1,340 ± 50, Geochron 1,350 ± 95.  Laboratory numbers GX-1668 and GX-1667 are in Bailey's notes 147 and 150 on p. 222. ↩

  13. 13.

    Snelling, Andrew A.  “Special Report:  Amazing “Ark” Exposé.”  Creation 14(4):26–38.  Sep 1992.  A claim-by-claim investigation of the Durupınar case by a young-earth geologist of the Creation Science Foundation, now Creation Ministries International.  It draws on the 1987 survey report, Baumgardner's letters, the laboratory certificates, and conversations with Bayraktutan, Fenner and Shea, and it is the most complete creationist account of the site.

    1. 13a.

      Section If it is Not the Ark of Noah, Then What is it?:  “the Bible in no way says that Noah’s Ark would be preserved as a witness to future generations”. ↩

    2. 13b.

      Section Trainloads of Petrified Wood?:  “they only analysed for three elements-calcium, iron and carbon”.  “When telephoned, the laboratory was adamant that they were not asked to give an opinion on what the object was and they were unable to do so.” ↩

    3. 13c.

      Section Introduction:  “However, this particular boat-shape is far from unique. The Turkish Air Force released another photograph several years ago showing three similar boat-shapes in the mudflow material on the footslopes of nearby Lesser Mount Ararat.” ↩

  14. 14.

    Collins, Lorence G.  Critical Examination of a Video:  Noah’s Ark.  Dec 12, 2020.  An essay by Collins answering, point by point, a video that promotes the site.  It reports his own thin sections of samples Wyatt had called wood.

    1. 14a.

      Section item 9:  “that Wyatt had identified as being wood in ribs, decks, posts, and walls of the ark”.  “Eleven were volcanic basalt and one was volcanic andesite.”  “free of charge, but the offer was never accepted”. ↩ ↩

  15. 15.

    Morris, John D.  “Has Noah's Ark Been Found in Iran?”  Institute for Creation Research.  Sep 1, 2006.  A short assessment by the geologist who then led the Institute for Creation Research and had searched Ağrı Dağı for decades.  He and the institute's other geologists examined Cornuke's 2005 photographs, and he states what tests would decide the question.

    1. 15a.

      “Unfortunately, he had no samples to show us, and thus it was not possible to be certain of its identity.”  “In our unanimous opinion, the formation was of geologic interest only.”  “Most likely the rock material is thinly bedded silicified sandstone which has been mistaken for wood grain. Regional fracturing has produced the superficial look of thick beams.” ↩

  16. 16.

    LaHaye, Tim F., and John D. Morris.  The Ark on Ararat.  Thomas Nelson, Nashville, and Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego.  1976.  The standard collection of Ararat sightings and expeditions, written by two believers in an Ark on the mountain;  Morris was a young-earth geologist who led ICR's expeditions.  It prints the sources of the major stories in full and is candid about their gaps.

    1. 16a.

      Page 133:  “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.” ↩

    2. 16b.

      Page 160:  “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.” ↩

    3. 16c.

      Page 82:  “he 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.”  Benjamin Franklin Allen, in a letter of 1945 printed by LaHaye and Morris, who describe him on p. 79 as Director of the Society for the Study of Creation, the Deluge, and Related Science. ↩

  17. 17.

    Price, Randall.  “Letter on the Hong Kong Noah's Ark claim.”  BiblePlaces Blog, posted by Todd Bolen.  Apr 28, 2010.  The full text of the letter in which Price, an archaeologist who had worked with the Hong Kong team, set out the charge that the wood was planted.  He calls it his opinion based on what others told him.

    1. 17a.

      “below is my opinion based on what I have seen and heard (from others who claim to have been eyewitnesses or know the exact details)”.  “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.”  “I have 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)”.  “has all of the facts about the location, the men who planted the wood, and even the truck that transported it.”  “I am sorry to have to report that this is apparently a fake”. ↩

  18. 18.

    Noah's Ark Scans.  “Core Drilling Begins at Durupinar Noah’s Ark Site, Drill Bit Shatters on Possible Layer of Petrified Wood.”  GlobeNewswire.  Sep 23, 2026.  A paid press release from the promoting group on the 2026 core drilling.  It reports observations from the field but no laboratory results.  Mirror:  Archive.org

    1. 18a.

      “with Noah’s Ark Scan’s Andrew Jones serving as Vice President of the Noah’s Ark Research Project”. ↩

  19. 19.

    ToPa 3D.  Noah’s Ark – Nuh’un Gemisi:  Project Noah, LiDAR, Photogrammetry, Ground Penetrating Radar and Thermography Reality Capture Mapping.  2019.  A survey firm's report on its October 2019 radar, laser-scan and thermal survey of the site, with radar processed by Dan Bigman of Bigman Geophysical.  It presents images and depths but offers no interpretation.

    1. 19a.

      Page 14:  “AREAS OF INTEREST AT 7.1 METERS DEPTH”.  “RECTANGULAR SHAPED RETURNS DEPICT GEOMETRIC STRUCTURE IN THE ROCK (NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CANNOT BE DETERMINED)”. ↩ ↩

  20. 20.

    Hürriyet.  “Nuh’un Gemisi’ne ait olduğuna inanılıyordu! Kalıntılar incelendi, işte ilk sonuçlar.”  Hürriyet.  Oct 26, 2023.  A Turkish newspaper report quoting Faruk Kaya, vice-rector of Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University, on the first laboratory results from samples taken at the site with Istanbul Technical University.  It is the earliest public statement of the 2023 dating, and the university's own report has not been published.

    1. 20a.

      “Özel izinler alınarak toplanan 30'a yakın kaya ve toprak numuneleri, İTÜ laboratuvarlarında incelemeye alındı.”  “bölgede Kalkolitik dönemden beri yani milattan önce 5500 ve 3000 yılları arasındaki dönemden itibaren insan faaliyetlerinin olduğu düşünülmektedir”.  “Tarihlendirmeyle birlikte geminin burada olduğunu söylemek mümkün değil.”  Translation:  "Close to 30 rock and soil samples, collected under special permits, were examined in İTÜ laboratories" … "human activity is thought to have been present in the region since the Chalcolithic period, that is, from the period between 5500 and 3000 BC" … "With the dating it is not possible to say that the ship is here." ↩ ↩

  21. 21.

    Hardy, Chris, and Robert Carter.  “The biblical minimum and maximum age of the earth.”  Journal of Creation 28(2):89–96.  2014.  Two young-earth writers compute the range of Flood and creation dates the biblical numbers allow under each text and calendar assumption.

    1. 21a.

      Page 95, table 5:  Date estimates for the Flood, all BC:  Masoretic short sojourn 2256 to 2431;  Septuagint long sojourn 3181 to 3386.  The full range is 2256 to 3386 BC. ↩ ↩

  22. 22.

    Baumgardner, John R.  “¹⁴C Evidence for a Recent Global Flood and a Young Earth.”  Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, volume II, 587–630.  Institute for Creation Research and Creation Research Society.  Edited by Larry Vardiman, Andrew A. Snelling and Eugene F. Chaffin.  2005.  The young-earth RATE project's chapter on carbon-14.  It argues that the pre-Flood biosphere held hundreds of times today's carbon, which sets the radiocarbon level that genuine pre-Flood wood should show today.

    1. 22a.

      Pages 618–619:  “would have had, conservatively, 300–700 times the total C relative to our present world.”  “so that organisms with 0.2 pMC 14C 4500 years ago would display a level of 0.12 pMC today.”  Baumgardner twice calls the 0.2 pMC figure "very soft." ↩ ↩

  23. 23.

    The conversions are the sibling article's, in its script /unpublished-ai/mount-ararat-and-the-ararat-anomaly/research/pricing.ts.  The latest young-earth Flood date, 2256 BC 21, falls at about 3,800 radiocarbon years on the IntCal20 calibration curve.  RATE's 0.12 percent modern carbon 22 is 8,033 × ln(100 / 0.12), about 54,000 radiocarbon years, using the conventional mean life of 8,033 years. ↩

  24. 24.

    Balsiger, David W., and Charles E. Sellier.  In Search of Noah's Ark.  Sun Classic Books, Los Angeles.  1976.  The book of the 1976 Sunn Classic documentary, written to support the Ark on Ararat.  Its chapter on Navarra's wood lists the 1956 institutes, quotes their reports, and argues that radiocarbon should not be trusted on this sample.

    1. 24a.

      Pages 183–184:  “a hard and compact wood with a density of 1.100.”  “Consequently, one can suppose the age of the wood sample given varies around 5,000 years.”  F. Nasera of the Forestry Institute of Research and Experiments in Madrid. ↩

  25. 25.

    Navarra, Fernand, and Dave Balsiger.  Noah's Ark: I Touched It.  Logos International, Plainfield, New Jersey.  1974.  Navarra's own account of his expeditions and the 1955 find, prepared for American readers, with an appendix reprinting the 1956 reports from the institutes that examined the wood.

    1. 25a.

      Page 137:  “Summing up, let me say that I am very happy to read that the exact age of the wood which has been dated by the "radiocarbon" process was 4484 years old. This age agrees with the strict chronology of the Bible”.  An unsigned letter in the appendix, followed by a table that reaches 4,484 by adding 4,427 years from a Flood in 2472 BC to 1955 and 57 years of growth before the Flood. ↩

  26. 26.

    Snelling, Andrew A.  Is the Wood Recently Found on Mt. Ararat from the Ark?  Answers in Genesis.  Nov 9, 2011.  Snelling's publication of the Hong Kong team's four radiocarbon results, which they had given him before the announcement, with his reading of each.  The laboratories are not named because the team did not name them.

    1. 26a.

      Section Table 1:  “Activity higher than 100% of modern level. It means that this tree was growing after 1955.”  “C-14 age = 120±25 years BP”.  “C-14 age = 135±30 years BP”.  “C-14 age = 610±25 years BP”.  “C-14 age = 4269–4800 years BP”. ↩

  27. 27.

    Cornuke, Bob.  “The Ark of Noah in Iran?”  BASE Institute.  2007.  The BASE Institute's six-page case for an Iranian landing site, written in the first person by the leader of the 2005 and 2006 expeditions:  its reading of Genesis 8:4 and 11:2, its Assyrian and classical evidence for an Urartu reaching into Iran, and its list of what the teams found on Takht-e Suleiman.  It is the primary statement of the claim, and it calls the object a candidate rather than the Ark.

    1. 27a.

      Section page 6, list of findings and disclaimer:  “The object consists of dark rock with an uncanny beam-like appearance in several places.”  “The object fits the approximate dimensions of Noah's Ark”.  “Some samples tested by an independent lab showed signs of petrified wood. (Not the entire object.)”  “Wood at the Summit, which may be from the shrine, has been dated to be around 500 years old.”  “We found microscopic sea life in a rock sample from the object (a foram, which is normally only found at the depths of the sea).”  “The BASE Institute does not make the claim that we have found Noah's Ark. We'll let you draw your own conclusions. In our opinion, it's a candidate.” ↩ ↩

  28. 28.

    ScienceBlogs, Dispatches from the Culture Wars.  Young Earth Creationist Debunks Noah's Ark Find.  Jul 5, 2006.  A secular science blog's comment on Creation Ministries International's response, written from the expedition's photographs two weeks after the announcement.

    1. 28a.

      “They say they have them, but have never revealed who did the testing, what tests were performed, or released the actual lab report.” ↩

  29. 29.

    Cornuke, Robert.  Ark Fever.  Tyndale House, Wheaton, Illinois.  2005.  Cornuke's memoir of his Ark searches, from Ağrı Dağı in the 1980s to the first Iranian expedition of July 2005.  It gives his own account of the object, its height and the radiocarbon date of the wood his team brought down.

    1. 29a.

      Page 237:  “I had these wood samples tested by Beta Analytic, of Miami, Florida, the world’s largest provider of radiocarbon dating to the scientific community. Beta determined the age of the wood to be between 355 and 565 years old”.  “Obviously, wood that is only several hundred years old (rather than several thousand years or more) would not be fragments directly from Noah’s ark”.  The book prints the calendar range as AD 1440-1650.  Beta Analytic's report itself has not been published. ↩

  30. 30.

    Wyatt Archaeological Research.  Noah’s Ark:  The Early Years.  Sep 11, 2011.  Ron Wyatt's organisation's own account of his visits of 1977 to 1985, his measurements, his metal-detector readings and his laboratory results.  Mirror:  Archive.org

    1. 30a.

      Section 1979- Return to Turkey:  “the sample outside the formation showed a 1.88% carbon content; but the one from inside the crack yielded a 4.95% carbon content, an amount that was consistent with the presence of prior living matter, such as decayed or petrified wood.” ↩

  31. 31.

    Noah's Ark Scans.  Geophysical surveys, soil analysis, and structural evidence.  2026.  The group's page summarising its evidence for a buried vessel.

    1. 31a.

      “Samples extracted from within the Durupinar formation contained approximately three times more organic material than control samples taken from equivalent depths outside the formation boundary.” ↩

  32. 32.

    The Mirror.  “Archaeologists ‘find’ Noah’s Ark with incredible new discovery.”  The Mirror US.  May 14, 2025.  A tabloid report quoting Andrew Jones and the group's soil scientist, William Crabtree.

    1. 32a.

      “The potassium levels inside are also about 40 percent higher”.  “organic matter was found to be twice as high inside the formation compared to the surrounding soil”.  “beyond the 22 samples they have already gathered”. ↩

  33. 33.

    Bender, Friedrich.  “Wood Remains from the Landing Site of Noah's Ark Nearly 6500 Years Old.”  Bible and Spade 19(4).  Translated by W. Pasedag.  2006.  A German geologist's own account, in English translation, of a wood sample he collected on Cudi Dağı in 1953 and of its radiocarbon age, which he uses to argue for a local Mesopotamian flood.  Only a preview could be read, without the methods or the laboratory.

    1. 33a.

      “were dated with the 14 C method; they are 6500 years old, i.e. pre-Sumerian.” ↩

    2. 33b.

      “In the spring of 1953, I was able to climb Cudidag, despite the difficulties in reaching this location in eastern Turkey in those days, and to recover a sample of asphalt-bound wood remains (Bender 1956).”  “reports of Kurdish Muslims that the Cudidag was a pilgrim destination where “pieces of wood from Noah’s Ark,” relics of great value, could be dug up.”  “My guides’ constraints during this climb did not permit me to obtain detailed records of the geologic-Quaternary stratigraphy.” ↩

  34. 34.

    Crouse, Bill.  “Five Reasons Noah's Ark Did Not Land on Mt. Ararat; Five Reasons Why It Did Land on Cudi Dagh.”  Uluslararası Hz. Nuh ve Cudi Dağı Sempozyumu (International Noah and Judi Mountain Symposium), Şırnak, 27-29 September 2013.  Edited by H. Gündoğar, O. A. Yıldırım and M. A. Az.  2014.  The fullest case for Cudi by its leading evangelical advocate, an Ark researcher and former editor of the Ararat Report, given at a Turkish symposium held in Şırnak province.  It lists pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim witnesses, the Assyrian reliefs, and a reported wood find, and admits where the evidence is weak.

    1. 34a.

      Page 409:  “In the mid-twentieth Century a German scientist, Friedrich Bender, found particles of highly decayed wood at the site which also tested positive for asphalt. His carbon dating tests resulted in an ancient date of 4500 BC.”  “These discoveries are of course inconclusive”.  Crouse's source is Bender's memoir Wanderungen (1995). ↩

    2. 34b.

      Page 401:  “There is a definite tendency to update place names.”  On the Targums. ↩

  35. 35.

    Answers in Genesis.  “Arguments to Avoid.”  Answers in Genesis.  2026.  Answers in Genesis's index of creationist arguments it asks its readers to stop using.

    1. 35a.

      Section index entries:  “Special Report: Amazing “Ark” Exposé”.  “That Boat-shaped Rock . . . Is It Noah’s Ark?”  Both of the Durupınar articles, Snelling 1992 and Morris 1990, are filed under this heading. ↩

  36. 36.

    David, Leonard.  “Satellite Sleuth Closes in on Noah's Ark Mystery.”  Live Science.  Mar 9, 2006.  A science-news report on Porcher Taylor's anomaly project after DigitalGlobe released a 2003 QuickBird image, with comments from Taylor, the imagery analyst Rod Franz and the Boston University geologist Farouk El-Baz.

    1. 36a.

      “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.” ↩

  37. 37.

    Snelling, Andrew A.  “Is Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat?”  Answers.  Answers in Genesis.  May 2017.  A magazine article by Answers in Genesis's director of research setting out the volcano's history in four stages on top of a lava plateau and arguing from it that the mountain post-dates the Flood.  Its sidebars cover Navarra, the Ararat Anomaly and the glacier problem.

    1. 37a.

      Section sidebar:  “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.” ↩

  38. 38.

    Josephus, Flavius.  The Antiquities of the Jews.  Translated by William Whiston.  c. 94 (edition of 1737).  Josephus's history of the Jews from creation to the Jewish War, finished about AD 93-94.  Book 1 quotes Berossus and Nicolaus of Damascus on the Ark's remains, and book 20 places them in Adiabene.  Whiston's section numbers 1.3.5-6 and 20.2.2 correspond to the modern 1.90-95 and 20.24-25.

    1. 38a.

      Book 1, section 3.6 (1.93):  “It is said there is still some part of this ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans; and that some people carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they take away, and use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischiefs.”  Josephus quoting Berossus. ↩

  39. 39.

    Thomas, Brian.  “Possible Ark Site Has Mainstream Media Hopping.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Oct 1, 2026.  The Institute for Creation Research's response to the 2026 Durupınar claims, by a staff research scientist.  It reports Don Patton's photograph of similar forms beside the site.

    1. 39a.

      “I have personally examined the Durupinar site many times.”  “at least three nearby outcrops of similar shape and material”.  “Noah was not an admiral of a fleet.”  The speaker is Don Patton.  The photograph printed with the article is an oblique view with three arrows on ridges beside the mound. ↩

  40. 40.

    Habermehl, Anne.  “A Review of the Search for Noah's Ark.”  Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, 485–502.  Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, and Institute for Creation Research, Dallas.  Edited by Andrew A. Snelling.  2008.  A young-earth review of the whole Ark search for the main creationist research conference.  It weighs Ararat, Cudi, Durupınar and the Iranian proposals, lists the minor candidates, and concludes that the Ark probably did not land on Ararat.

    1. 40a.

      Page 492:  “The main objection to the Durupinar “ark” is that it appears to be a naturally occurring geological formation, and is only one of several in the area; the reason that this particular one attracted attention as a possible Ark is that it is about the right length (155 m, using an ancient longer cubit).” ↩