The Durupınar Formation

"There was, for example, no evidence for wood, petrified or otherwise." — John Baumgardner, on the cores he drilled into the formation, 1988¹

Summary

The Durupınar formation is not the remains of Noah's Ark.  It is a mound of mud and broken rock, shaped like an almond, sitting in an active earthflow about 30 km south of the summit of Ağrı Dağı.  Its shape is real and striking.  Everything else that was claimed for it has failed when measured.  The first people to show this were creationists:  a creationist geologist in 1976, a creationist geophysicist who drilled it in 1988, and the young-earth magazine Creation, which published the decisive exposé in 1992.  Whether Genesis 8:4 points to this region at all is a question for the parent article, Searching for Noah's Ark.  This article judges only the site.

1. What it is (Part 1). The mound is 150 to 164 m long and 42 to 50 m wide, depending on who measured it. The one peer-reviewed geology paper on it, by the Turkish engineering geologist Murat Avci in 2007, calls it "a large discontinuity-bounded block of Miocene limestone which has slumped and crept downslope on the weak Eocene clays," shaped by the earthflow that passes around it.² Salih Bayraktutan, the Turkish geologist who co-led the 1987-1988 surveys, treats it as a mass carried in the Telçeker landslide.³
2. How it became famous (Part 2). A Turkish army captain, İlhan Durupınar, noticed the shape on survey photographs in 1959. Life ran the photograph on 5 September 1960 under the caption "Noah's Ark?"⁴ An American team dug and dynamited it that year and found only "dirt, rocks and more dirt."⁵ The story that a May 1948 earthquake exposed it is not supported by the earthquake catalogues, which hold no shock near the site in 1948.
3. Ron Wyatt's case (Part 3). From 1977 Ron Wyatt claimed the mound was 515 ft long, exactly 300 Egyptian cubits, with lines of iron, petrified deck timbers, rivets, and anchor stones nearby, and that Turkey recognised it as the Ark in 1987. Each claim failed when tested. The laboratory he cited measured three elements and "was adamant that they were not asked to give an opinion on what the object was."⁶ A geologist who cut thin sections of twelve of Wyatt's "wood" samples found that "Eleven were volcanic basalt and one was volcanic andesite."⁷
4. The 1987-1988 surveys (Part 4). John Baumgardner, a creationist geophysicist, and Bayraktutan ran radar on a 2 m grid, a magnetometer and a seismograph in 1987. Their report found a flat reflecting surface 4 to 8 m down and said, honestly, that the data "in no way conflict" with an Ark but could not decide without drilling.⁸ They drilled four holes in 1988. By Baumgardner's later account, rock lay within 5 m of the surface in three of the four holes, and the cores held "no evidence for wood, petrified or otherwise."¹ Baumgardner concluded that mud had flowed "around a narrow ridge-shaped body of rock."¹ Bayraktutan still calls the mound the nearest thing to a ship's trace or mould, while conceding that no sample of a ship was ever taken.³
5. The numbers (Part 6). The length fits a 300-cubit Ark only at the longest cubits. The width is 1.6 to 2.3 times the Ark's 50 cubits, and the mound is 3 to 4 times as long as it is wide, against the Ark's 6. Wyatt's reply, that the walls splayed outward, survives this test: a hull whose sides fell flat would leave a footprint of 160 by 49 m at the common cubit, close to the mound. So the outline settles nothing. The material does. A collapsed hull would leave its floor under the middle of the mound, and at least two of the three holes drilled there reached rock within 5 m. Wood that survives 4,400 years survives as wood or as petrified wood with its cells intact, and none was found. At least three similar boat shapes lie nearby, so the shape alone picks out nothing.
6. The new claims, 2019-2026 (Part 7). The group Noah's Ark Scans and its Turkish university partners report radar "right angles," "tunnels" and soil with more organic matter inside the outline than outside. None of it is in a peer-reviewed journal. The radar company's own report says its rectangular returns are "NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CANNOT BE DETERMINED."⁹ The soil figures change from one interview to the next. The Turkish official who announced the 2023 dating said that with it "it is not possible to say the ship is here."¹⁰ Laboratory results from the 2026 cores are promised for the winter of 2026-2027.
7. The creationist verdict (Part 8). Answers in Genesis files both of its Durupınar articles under "Arguments to Avoid."¹¹ Creation Ministries International says the site has "nothing to do with Noah's Ark."¹² The Institute for Creation Research found "compelling reasons to cross it off the list of possible ark sites."¹³ Their reasons are the survey data and the failed samples, not a reading of the text.

Verdict:  the Durupınar formation is a natural landform.  The case against it does not depend on doubting the Flood, and it was built by people who wanted the Ark to be found.

Part 1: What and where the formation is

The formation lies in the Telçeker valley beside the village of Üzengili, formerly Mahser, about 18 km south-east of Doğubayazıt.  It is 29.5 km south of the summit of Ağrı Dağı, the mountain now called Ararat, and about 1,960 m above sea level.¹⁴  The published sources give at least five different distances to the mountain, from 12 miles to 50 km, so a reader comparing them should use the map rather than any one of them.

From the air the mound looks like a hull:  pointed at one end, rounded at the other, with a low ridge down the middle and steep sides.  On the ground it is mud and broken rock with a few rock outcrops.  Clifford Burdick, a creationist geologist who walked it in 1973, wrote that "What had looked like a flow of lava in the aerial pictures turned out to be a deep deposit of clay, intermixed with small breccia, along the bed of a stream."¹⁵

The measurements differ, because nobody has published a survey of the outline.

The sources are Shea,¹⁶ Wyatt,¹⁷ Merling,⁵ Avci,² Bayraktutan³ and the Post.¹⁸  The figures agree on the main point:  the mound is about 150 to 165 m long and 42 to 50 m wide.

The setting is an active landslide.  Bayraktutan, who has studied the valley since 1985, describes three generations of landslides and a mudflow that is still moving.  In his words, the "currently acting Mud Flow continues through narrow channel-like corridore, leaving ark-shaped mass behind, at the entrance of 350 m wide and apprx. 1,3 km long channel."³  Avci, writing in the Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment, reads the mound as a block of limestone that slid downhill on soft clay and was then shaped by the earthflow passing it:  "The shape of the feature has been modified by abrasion caused by passing earthflow material as well as ice melt and limestone dissolution processes."²  John Morris, a creationist geological engineer who surveyed the site twice, gave the same picture in 1990:  "Just as water flows around a rock in a stream bed, the site has acquired a streamlined shape, due to the dynamics of the slowly flowing material."¹⁹

What the rock is remains disputed, and that should be said plainly.  The 1987 survey report calls the outcrop in the middle of the mound calc-schist.⁸  Andrew Snelling, writing for Creation in 1992, calls it a limestone full of foraminifera.⁶  Avci calls the whole mound a block of Miocene limestone.  Morris calls the rocks an ophiolite suite, a slice of old sea floor;¹⁹ so did Bayraktutan, by Baumgardner's report in 2021.¹  Bayraktutan's own 2019 abstract describes a clay matrix "with randomly distributed dominantly ultrabasic rock fragments."³  These descriptions disagree because nobody has published the core logs or a geological map of the mound.  They agree on what matters here:  every account by someone who has sampled it describes rock and clay.  None describes wood.

Part 2: How the shape became famous

1959.  William Shea, an Old Testament professor at Andrews University who made the first creationist case for the site, gives the standard account:  the discovery "was made in the winter of 1959 by a captain in the Turkish Army, Ilhan Durupinar by name, while he was surveying some aerial photographs of Eastern Turkey" taken for the national geodetic survey and NATO.¹⁶  Life printed the photograph on 5 September 1960 under the caption "Noah's Ark?"⁴  The Life text, as reproduced by Wyatt's supporters, already reported the outcome:  "A quick two-day survey revealed no sign that the object was man made."²⁰

1960.  The expedition was led by George Vandeman, with Captain Durupınar, the photogrammetrist Brandenberger, the writer René Noorbergen and the archaeologist Siegfried Horn.²¹  Before going into the field, the Ohio State photogrammetry expert who had studied the photographs said:  "I have no doubt at all that this object is a ship."²²  On the ground the object was longer than the 450 ft printed in most Bibles of the day, and "the decision was made to blast the walls with dynamite to see if any wood might fly out."²¹  None did.  Merling, an Andrews University archaeologist, summarises the result:  the team found only "dirt, rocks and more dirt," and Vandeman's release called the formation "a freak of nature and not man-made."⁵  Shea, who wanted the site re-examined, agreed on the facts:  "It was determined that there were no archaeological artifacts whatsoever at the site."¹⁶  So the site's first scientific visit, by people who hoped to find the Ark, ended in the verdict it carries today.

The earthquake story does not fit the catalogues.  Snelling's 1992 article says the shape was "Apparently first seen by a local Kurdish farmer following an earthquake in May 1948," and that "Another earthquake in December 1978 is said to have enhanced the relief."⁶  The source of the 1948 date is David Fasold's interview with a villager named Reshit, from which Fasold concluded that "the Ark had been revealed by an earthquake in the middle of the fifth month of 1948."²¹  Fasold himself noted that "there was no damage to the village in 1948," and that nobody in Doğubayazıt, less than ten miles away, knew of the earthquake until the villagers told them.²¹  Bayraktutan gives a different date, "a local Earthquake (August 1949, MMS 5,0-5,5)."³

The instrumental record holds neither.  The Kandilli Observatory catalogue lists only one earthquake within 150 km of the site from 1947 through 1950, a magnitude 4.8 near Sarıkamış in December 1947, about 149 km away.  The nearest shock in those years is a magnitude 5.2 on 3 October 1946, about 12 km away.²³  The International Seismological Summary for 1948 lists five earthquakes within 300 km, none closer than 175 km.²⁴  The great shock of August 1949 was at Karlıova, about 300 km to the west.²⁴  There is no catalogued earthquake of magnitude 5 or more near the site in 1978;  the large regional shock was at Çaldıran on 24 November 1976, magnitude 7.3 to 7.5, 40 to 47 km to the south.²³  A small local shock below the catalogues' threshold cannot be ruled out, and a felt shock from a distant quake can loosen a slope.  But the dates in the story are remembered, not recorded, and the mound may have been visible long before 1948.  Nothing in the verdict below depends on when it was first seen.

Part 3: Ron Wyatt's case, claim by claim

Ron Wyatt, "A nurse anaesthetist from Madison, Tennessee," in Snelling's description,⁶ read the Life story in 1960 and first visited the site in 1977.  Until his death in 1999 he was its main promoter.²⁰  His character and his other claimed discoveries belong to Bad Actors and False Discoveries.  Here his claims about the site are stated in his organisation's words and then tested.

The length.  Wyatt's case began with a cubit.  "After all, 300 Royal Egyptian Cubits equals 515 feet, not the 450 feet commonly accepted."  In 1979 "He measured the object and got a 512 foot length," plus a section about a yard long that he took to be broken off, "a total of 515 FEET!"¹⁷  That match is real only for one cubit.  Part 6 prices it against the others, and against the width, which he did not match.

The iron lines.  Wyatt's metal-detector work "showed an organized grid of metal within the object," with readings "every 9 feet" along the sides.¹⁷  The lines were later traced with a "molecular frequency generator."  Snelling reports that two scientists "built and tested working models" of that device and that the brass rods it used were "in essence, as divining rods."⁶  An ordinary metal detector found hot spots, but "these were randomly distributed and not in a regular pattern along lines," and such a detector reaches only about 30 cm into the ground.⁶  Morris adds that "the anomalies discerned by this technique were not confirmed by use of a metal detector," according to Baumgardner, and that manganese nodules and nearby iron ore "render any sober metal detection effort futile."¹⁹  The 1987 magnetometer survey, run on a 2 m grid, found one strong anomaly, over the rock outcrop in the middle, and explained it as rock:  "the calc-schist rock has a lower magnetic mineral content than the surrounding soil."⁸

The "iron fitting" and the rivets.  Baumgardner himself dug an iron-rich object out of the mound in 1985, and "at the time, Baumgardner thought that he was analyzing an iron alloy that Noah had made in a forge."²⁵  Lorence Collins, a petrologist at California State University Northridge, sectioned it.  The black shiny surfaces were goethite, a hydrated iron oxide, with magnetite, and the object was full of mineral grains.  "If Noah's ship builders had forged this supposed iron bracket in a primitive smelter, the bracket would not consist of iron that was thoroughly mixed with clay, quartz, calcite, and anthophyllite particles but would have been solid iron."⁴  Three laboratories assayed Wyatt's "rivet," and "the assays from all three laboratories returned results consistent with the chemical composition of the major local rock type, basalt."⁶  By 1992 Baumgardner "now concedes that there is no evidence that it is a man-made item."⁶

The carbon.  Wyatt reported that a sample from inside a crack held 4.95 % carbon against 1.88 % outside, "an amount that was consistent with the presence of prior living matter, such as decayed or petrified wood."¹⁷  Snelling telephoned the laboratory, Galbraith Laboratories of Tennessee.  Its certificate shows "they only analysed for three elements-calcium, iron and carbon," and "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."⁶  The assay "did not specify that it was organic carbon," and the local basalt boulders "contain abundant calcite," which is carbon in mineral form.⁶  A carbon number with no test for organic carbon cannot tell wood from limestone.

The petrified wood.  Wyatt's 1992 newsletter announced that "thin sections have been cut from this deck timber for microscopic examination" and that "at least this portion of the deck planking is laminated wood!"²⁶  No laboratory, image or section number was ever published.  Snelling reports that Wyatt "refused to submit the sample for such sectioning and proper scientific testing," and that every trained person who had seen it "identified it as basalt."⁶  Collins did the test on the samples he could get.  Fasold gave him twelve black rocks "that Wyatt had identified as being wood in ribs, decks, posts, and walls of the ark."  None was wood:  "Eleven were volcanic basalt and one was volcanic andesite."  Collins offered to section the remaining slab "free of charge, but the offer was never accepted."⁷

The anchor stones.  At Kazan, also called Arzap, 16 to 24 km from the mound, stand eight to eleven large slabs with a hole cut near one end and crosses carved on their faces.⁴  Wyatt read them as drogue stones hung from the Ark, with eight crosses for eight people.  Snelling gave four replies.  The stones are basalt, local rock, and "Noah would scarcely have used as anchor stones slabs of rock indigenous to the area where the Ark came to rest after the Flood."  The holes sit too near the edges to bear the weight, and show "no sign of any wear."  And "the number of crosses on them varies from three to 20."⁶  Collins's later paper concludes that "the stones labeled as 'anchors' naturally occur in the area."²⁵  The crosses are Christian symbols, so the carving at least dates from the Christian era, thousands of years after any date proposed for the Flood.  The sibling article Other Proposed Landing Sites treats them with the other features of the district.

The Turkish recognition.  Wyatt said that a Turkish commission had concluded the mound was a boat, and that in 1987 the government made it a national park because it held the Ark's remains.⁶  What happened is narrower.  On 21 June 1987 the governor of Ağrı dedicated a visitor centre at a ceremony where Wyatt was present.⁷  Three Turkish teams had examined the site in September 1985;  "Some digging was done, but no artefacts were found.  Two of the teams were from Ankara, and both returned with a negative report."⁶  Bayraktutan, who sat on the governor's commission, told Snelling "most emphatically that as far as he is aware the Governor's Noah's Ark Commission has never declared the site to definitely be Noah's Ark or a boat."⁶  Bayraktutan's own account confirms the narrower version:  because of the mound's unusual features it was decided to protect it "NUH TUFANI ve NUHUN GEMISI anısına," in memory of Noah's Flood and Noah's Ark, and it was declared a protected site.³  A visitor centre and a heritage listing are not a finding that the Ark is there.

David Fasold's retreat.  Fasold, a former merchant marine officer,⁶ worked the site with Wyatt from 1985 and wrote the book-length case for it, The Ark of Noah (1988).  The same book records two concessions he and Baumgardner shared against Wyatt:  "the flow in which the Ark lies is not volcanic in origin," and "there appears to be at present no remains of wood, petrified or otherwise."²¹  In 1996 he co-signed Collins's paper calling the site "a completely natural rock formation."⁴  He kept one hope, in Collins's words:  "although the structure is not Noah's Ark, it may very well be the site which the ancients regarded as the ship of the Deluge."⁴

Part 4: The 1985-1988 surveys, in their authors' words

The only measured subsurface data on the site come from four seasons of work led by John Baumgardner, a creationist geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Salih Bayraktutan, a geologist and director of the earthquake research centre at Atatürk University in Erzurum.⁶  Their 1987 report, "July 1987 Geophysical Investigation of Noah's Ark (Durupinar Site)," was never formally published.  A scan of it is now posted by the Noah's Ark Scans group, and it is quoted here from that scan.

1985.  Baumgardner first came with Wyatt and Fasold.  That August they bored six shallow auger holes and "encountered rock at one meter depth in all holes except one."⁸

1986.  Wyatt and Fasold went to the site "without a permit and in 30 minutes made 10 passes with the radar scanner only over the southernmost portion of the boat-shape."⁶  Their records were later shown as evidence of bulkheads.  Tom Fenner of Geophysical Survey Systems, the company that built the radar, tried to repeat them the next year:  "After numerous attempts over a period of one and a half days we were unable to duplicate their radar records in any way."  He added:  "I was never convinced the site was the remains of Noah's Ark. In fact the more time I spent on the site, the more skeptical I became."⁶

1987.  The joint Atatürk University and Los Alamos team ran a full survey.  The radar antenna "was dragged across the site on transects spaced two meters apart," 71 transects in all, at 120 MHz for the deepest reach.⁸  The magnetometer took 1,177 readings "on a square grid of points spaced two meters apart."⁸  A one-channel seismograph added a few lines.  The report's abstract states the result and its limit together:

the ground-penetrating radar detected an interface, approximately planar, between four and eight meters below the ground surface, that produces strong reflections of the tranmitted radar pulses. … Whether this abrupt change in properties is the transition between the overlying clay soil and underlying bedrock or, alternatively, a material other than bedrock such as the petrified remains of a large boat, is impossible to answer with the data presently available.⁸

The seismic data showed a layer of "moderately high seismic velocity" at 6 to 8 m, 2,400 to 3,300 m/s, "something other than the clay soil present at the ground surface."⁸  The report's conclusion leaned toward the Ark and said so openly:

We conclude that the data from our geophysical investigations in no way conflict with the proposition that the unusual boat-shaped site near Mahser village contains the remains of Noah's Ark. Indeed, the existence of remains of a large man-made structure in the site is an attractive way to account for the highly anomalous feature of the extensive, almost planar, reflector observed in the radar data. However, without actual samples of the subsurface materials we feel that definitive interpretations of our data are not possible.⁸

That is a fair statement of a fair test.  It named the prediction that would decide it:  drill, and see whether the reflector is a deck or bedrock.

1988.  They drilled.  Baumgardner's newsletter of 19 August 1988 reported:  "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."  He noted nodules of limonite, an iron oxide, which "could represent the rusted remains of metallic iron objects."  Then the decisive line:  "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."¹  He added a fair caution:  "core drilling is severely limited in its ability to find buried archaeological structure, especially if it is sparsely distributed and has been significantly altered by decay and chemical weathering."¹

What Baumgardner concluded.  His later account, in an email of 1999, gives the reason he changed his mind.  The cores "revealed the existence of a ridge of basement rock aligned along the centerline of the almond shaped formation."  At the upper end it lay under "about 15 feet of the mudflow alluvium";  along the lower two-thirds it reached 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."¹  In 2014 he gave hole-by-hole detail:  hole 1 stayed in mudflow to 10 m;  in holes 2 and 3, "At 5 meters depth the material changed abruptly from the mudflow material with lots of pea-sized gravel to layered bedrock";  in hole 4, "the bedrock extended all the way to the surface."¹  Asked in 1997 about Wyatt's charge that he had changed his view to keep his job, he answered:  "Ron's claims here are just as bogus as his claims about that site. Far from hiding my creationism, I'm well known for it."²⁷

Snelling's 1992 account, which draws on Baumgardner's letters, the 1987 report and telephone conversations with Bayraktutan,⁶ says the drilling hit basalt at 6 to 7 m in the north of the mound, "exactly the depth predicted by the radar and seismic work," and a folded rock in the south, with the limestone between.  "Whereas the investigation team were hopeful that the reflector indicated by the radar and seismic surveys was in fact the petrified wood of the deck of the Ark, the drill intersections of solid basement rock below the surficial mudflow and weathered material immediately ruled out any petrified Ark or its remains within this site."⁶

What Bayraktutan concluded.  The Turkish co-leader did not reach the same verdict, and this article should not pretend he did.  In his 2019 paper he still finds the mound's size, symmetry and position "olağan üstü," extraordinary, for normal erosion, notes that its dimensions are "kutsal kitap boyutlarına yakın," close to the scriptural dimensions, and calls it the nearest thing to a ship's trace or mould among objects on the earth's surface.  He also concedes that no sample of a ship was ever taken:  "Sonradan 1988 yılında yaptığımız 4 sondajdan, sağlıklı karot örnekleri alınamadığından (özellikle ince taneli fraksiyondan) burada gemiye ait somut örnek alma imkanı olmadı."³  That is, because sound cores could not be recovered from the four 1988 holes, especially of the fine-grained material, there was no chance to take a concrete sample of the ship.  His English abstract of the same paper describes the radar's vertical reflections as "either from fractures with relatively higher moiture or clayey infilled surfaces."³  So the Muslim geologist who knows the valley best keeps the site open as a heritage object and a possible "trace," while describing everything he measured in natural terms.  The Christian geophysicist who drilled it closed the question.

The record of the cores is inconsistent, and that is the biggest gap in the evidence.  Baumgardner described the four holes in 1988 as reaching 10 m with "reasonably good cores," and in 2014 as holes of 10, 6, 6 and 1 m.  Bayraktutan wrote in 2019 that no sound cores were recovered.  Noah's Ark Scans now calls them four attempts "without success,"²⁸ and its 2026 press release says the cores were "ultimately corrupted with water used to cool the core drilling bit."²⁹  Snelling promised "A fuller treatment" of "the core drilling, and the geological sampling and mapping" in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal.⁶  No such paper has been found.  The core logs have never been published.  Every account that gives depths agrees on one thing:  rock or rock-bearing mud lies inside the outline at depths of 1 to 7 m, and no account reports wood.

Part 5: The geology

Three geological accounts are on the record, and they differ in detail more than in kind.

Collins and Fasold, 1996.  Collins first argued that the mound was a fold, "a doubly plunging syncline," whose tilted rock layers carried limonite and magnetite in the lines that Wyatt had mapped as iron.⁴  He found that "All rock samples from the structure are pyroxene-bearing andesite or basalt partly altered to serpentine."⁴  He also argued that a fossil-bearing limestone filled a channel cut across the fold, so that the fold was older than any rocks a Flood could have laid down.⁴  He later withdrew the fold.  A postscript to his own copy of the paper says the syncline "was a reasonable possibility," but that later work showed "this site cannot be a doubly-plunging syncline but is a natural geologic structure that has the shape of a stream-lined boat that resulted from landslide debris."⁴  His 2016 paper in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith describes the limestone as "a wedge that outcrops at its midpoint,"²⁵ not a bed that crosses the whole structure.  So his age argument from the limestone is weaker than the 1996 abstract makes it look, and this article does not rest on it.

Avci, 2007.  The one peer-reviewed paper reads the mound as a slumped block of Miocene limestone on Eocene clay, abraded by the passing earthflow.²

Bayraktutan, 2019 and 2020.  The valley is a landslide with three episodes of movement, bounded by faults, with a mudflow still active.  The "ark-shaped ground" was "uplifted by the 1949 earthquake, flowed northwards down the slope till entrance of the narrow channel, where it was stuck by the mud flow- dynamics patthern from both sides."³⁰

All three describe the same process:  a firmer body of rock or rock-rich mud, with softer debris flowing past and around it.  Flow around an obstacle makes a streamlined shape, blunt upstream and tapering downstream, the shape of a boat's plan.  Snelling, Morris, Collins, Avci and Bayraktutan each say so in their own way, and Creation Ministries International summarised it in 2026:  "mud slowly flowing downhill in the region divides around an obstacle and then rejoins."¹²

The shape is not unique.  Snelling wrote in 1992 that the Turkish Air Force had released a photograph "showing three similar boat-shapes in the mudflow material on the footslopes of nearby Lesser Mount Ararat."⁶  Collins noted that "Other streamlined rock-shapes have been found in the area (Guner, 1986)," though Bayraktutan held that these "do not display the same morphological and internal features."⁴  Don Patton, a creationist who told the Institute for Creation Research that he has examined the site many times, supplied it with an aerial photograph showing "at least three nearby outcrops of similar shape and material," and put the point briefly:  "Noah was not an admiral of a fleet."¹³  The sibling article Other Proposed Landing Sites examines the group of similar mounds within a few kilometres of Durupınar.  Their existence bears directly on this one, and Part 6 prices it.

Part 6: Pricing the claim

Every number in this Part comes from the arithmetic in research/pricing.ts, which a reader can rerun.³¹

The dimensions

Genesis 6:15 gives the Ark as 300 cubits long, 50 wide and 30 high.  The cubit is uncertain, and Noah's Ark:  The Logistics sets out the measured range.  This table uses its four values.

The formation is 150 to 164 m long and 42 to 50 m wide (Part 1).

1. The length fits only the long cubits. For 300 cubits to equal the formation's length, the cubit must be 50.0 to 54.7 cm. The royal cubit of about 52.4 cm sits in that range. The common cubit of about 44.5 cm does not. The length match is real, but it was found by choosing the cubit after measuring the mound.
2. The width does not fit any cubit. For 50 cubits to equal the width, the cubit would have to be 84 to 100 cm. No ancient cubit is that long. The mound is 1.6 to 2.3 times as wide as the Ark. Shea saw this in 1976: the formation "is the same length as Noah's Ark, but it is twice as wide at its widest point."¹⁶
3. The proportions do not fit. The Ark is six times as long as it is wide at any cubit. The mound is 3.0 to 3.9 times as long as it is wide. This test needs no cubit value at all.

The best reply, priced.  Wyatt's answer was that the mound is wider than the Ark "because the outside walls have been 'splayed out' by the weight of mud."⁶  Critics have dismissed this, but the geometry deserves a fair test.  If each 30-cubit side of a hull fell flat outward, the footprint would grow by 60 cubits each way, to 360 by 110 cubits.  That footprint is 3.27 times as long as it is wide, inside the mound's range of 3.0 to 3.9.  At the common cubit of 44.45 cm it measures 160 by 49 m, which matches the mound closely.  So a hull that collapsed outward is not ruled out by the outline.  The dimensions are suggestive but not decisive in either direction, and this article does not rest its verdict on them.  Splaying only the sides, and keeping Wyatt's 300 royal cubits for the length, gives 157 by 58 m, a ratio of 2.73, which fits less well.

The floor of the hull

A collapsed hull changes where its timber should be, not whether it is there.  Its keel and bottom planking, 22 to 26 m wide, would lie under the middle of the mound, and its fallen sides would lie in the outer walls.

• The middle. Three of the four 1988 holes were "near the centerline of the site."¹ By Baumgardner's 2014 account, hole 1 stayed in mudflow to 10 m, holes 2 and 3 entered "layered bedrock" at 5 m, and hole 4 met bedrock at the surface. He does not say which hole was on the flank, but on any assignment at least two of the three centre-line holes reached rock within 5 m. The six auger holes of 1985 found rock at 1 m in five of them.⁸ An intact hull 30 cubits deep is 13.3 to 15.7 m deep, so rock at 5 m inside the outline leaves room for at most a third of it. A collapsed hull would leave a layer of timber, or petrified timber, above that rock. No core and no auger hole reports one.
• The sides. Snelling describes the walls as "simply hardened mud, containing boulders of the various local rock types," with "no petrified wood holding in the mud in any way reminiscent of the outer planking of a wooden hulled vessel."⁶

The wood

A real hull was made of wood, so the question is what 4,400 years would leave of it.  The answer depends on oxygen.

• Exposed to air, wood rots. The standard review of log decay, by Mark Harmon and colleagues, reports that the slowest-decaying logs measured lose mass at 0.004 to 0.007 per year, a "half-time of 98 to 172 years."³² At 0.004 per year, the fraction left after 4,350 years is e^(-17.4), about 3 parts in 100 million. Even at a rate ten times slower than the slowest log on record, less than a fifth would remain. Wood that survives that long has been protected: "Oxygen is required for significant rates of microbial decomposition of lignin."³²
• Sealed from air, wood can last for millennia. Robert Blanchette's review of archaeological wood finds that wood that persists "is usually protected by an environment that limits microbial activity. These special conditions may allow wood to survive centuries or even thousands of years."³³ Parts of the hull of the Uluburun shipwreck, sunk about 1400 BC, "survived for several thousand years" under cargo and sediment.³³ So it is not fair to say that no Ark timber could survive. Buried in wet clay, some could. But surviving wood is still wood, with its cell structure intact.
• Petrified, wood keeps its cell structure too. In a seven-year experiment in a Japanese hot spring, wood took up silica as "silica spheres in cell lumina of the wood tissue," reaching 38 % silica by weight, and the authors suggest natural silicified wood may form "within fairly short period of tens or hundreds of years."³⁴ So petrifaction within 4,400 years is possible where silica-rich water flows. Petrified wood under a microscope shows its cells. Basalt shows crystals.

That gives a clean test, and it has been run.  Every sample put forward as Ark wood that has been sectioned was volcanic rock.  In Snelling's words, "every sample from the site that others have suggested might be petrified wood has under the microscope always been basalt."⁶⁷  The cores found "no evidence for wood, petrified or otherwise."¹  Collins summarised the whole record:  "no fossilized wood or traces of elemental carbon, wood, or reed fragments have ever been found associated with the limonite walls or in any other place during trenching or core drilling."⁴

The shape

The shape is the only evidence that ever pointed to an Ark here.  It is evidence only if natural processes rarely make it.  At least three similar shapes stand in the same district, by the Turkish Air Force photograph that Snelling reports and by Patton's photograph,⁶¹³ and the sibling article examines a group of five.  If one boat-shaped mound among four to six were the Ark, the shape alone would pick it out only one time in four to six.  More to the point, the others show that this earthflow makes boat shapes without hulls.  The shape tells us how mud flows around an obstacle.  It says nothing about what the obstacle is.

Part 7: The new claims, 2019-2026

Since 2019 the site has been promoted by Noah's Ark Scans, a group led by Andrew Jones, working with Turkish universities.  The work has produced radar images, soil analyses, two dating announcements and, in 2026, new cores.  The test applied here is the same one the 1987 team set for itself:  what was measured, and where was it published.

What has been published.  Nothing from this work is in a peer-reviewed journal.  The record is two corporate reports, papers and abstracts in the proceedings of the International Mount Ararat and Noah's Ark Symposium held at Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University, a workshop abstract, project web pages, press releases and press interviews.  The 2023 symposium was hosted by that university with Istanbul Technical University, and its abstract book thanks "Andrews University for being the primary sponsor of this symposium."³⁵  No Andrews University laboratory or field report on the site was found.

The radar.  In October 2019 the firm ToPa 3D surveyed the mound with ground-penetrating radar at 100 and 250 MHz, laser scanning and thermal imaging.  Its report shows returns at about 7 m that look rectangular, and its own caption reads:  "RECTANGULAR SHAPED RETURNS DEPICT GEOMETRIC STRUCTURE IN THE ROCK (NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CANNOT BE DETERMINED)."⁹  The thermal report concluded that "Interpretation of the data was not possible."³⁶  Jones's own overview of 2021 conceded that "traditional excavations still would have to be done to ground truth what is being interpreted from the geophysical survey results."³⁷  His 2024 symposium paper comparing the 1987 and 2019 radar ends:  "When compared to the previous geophysical work done in the 1980s more questions are raised as to how these features relate to each other and if they’re manmade or natural. More scientific research is needed at the site."³⁸

Those are careful statements.  The public ones are not.  By 2025 the press reported "a 13-foot tunnel running through the center of the formation."³⁹  In April 2026 Jones told Fox News that "there are tunnels about four meters down and about two meters high, going down the center of the boat," and that "I do believe that this is the real, decayed, buried remains of Noah's Ark."⁴⁰  On 1 October 2026 a press release for Khosrow Bakhtar, the inventor of a proprietary radar, claimed "exclusively non-geological features, including organized hallways and tunnels," and quoted him:  "It could be a ship. It could be a spaceship."⁴¹  No processing method, velocity model or data file has been released for any of these.

Radar of this kind measures where the electrical properties of the ground change.  It does not identify a material.  Bayraktutan, who has run radar on the mound since 1987, reads its vertical reflections as "either from fractures with relatively higher moiture or clayey infilled surfaces."³  A slumped and cracked block of rock inside a landslide gives straight, crossing reflectors of its own.  Creation Ministries International made the point in 2026:  "GPR does not take 'photos' below the ground; it measures dielectric contrasts. Such findings as those reported are not at all unusual in complex subsurface geology where natural rock folds, mudflows, or jointed basalt formations are present."¹²  A "tunnel" 2 m high, 4 m down, along the centre line is also where Baumgardner's 1988 holes found the boundary between mudflow and rock at 5 m.

The soil.  The group reports that soil from inside the outline differs from soil outside.  The figures change with the telling.  In May 2025 its soil scientist, William Crabtree, said "The potassium levels inside are also about 40 percent higher," with organic matter reported as twice as high, from 22 samples.³⁹  The project's web page says "approximately three times more organic material than control samples."⁴²  In April 2026 Jones told the Daily Mail that the differences in "pH, organic matter and potassium" carried "95 percent confidence that something like a decayed wooden ship is causing them."⁴³  No laboratory, method, sample depth or data table has been published.

Even if the numbers hold, the design cannot answer the question.  A control sample is useful only if it differs from the test sample in one thing.  Every geologist who has described the site, including Bayraktutan, says the mound is a different body from the debris flowing around it:  firmer, older or a different rock.  Different material, drainage and plant cover give different soil chemistry.  So "inside differs from outside" is what the natural explanation predicts too.  A real test would identify the organic matter, for example as wood fragments under a microscope or wood-specific compounds, and date it.

The dating.  In October 2023 Faruk Kaya, vice-rector of Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University, announced that about 30 rock and soil samples analysed at Istanbul Technical University suggested human activity in the area from the Chalcolithic, 5500 to 3000 BC.  He added at once:  "Tarihlendirmeyle birlikte geminin burada olduğunu söylemek mümkün değil."¹⁰  That is:  with the dating, it is not possible to say the ship is here.  No method, laboratory or report was named.  Later English press reports turned this into samples "dated to between 3,500 and 5,000 years ago, roughly the time period associated with the biblical flood," with "microfossils from sea creatures such as mollusks" that the Turkish report does not mention.⁴⁴  Signs of human activity in an inhabited valley are not evidence of a ship, and Kaya said so.

The 2026 cores.  The 2026 season was led by Cenker Atila, an archaeologist at Sivas Cumhuriyet University, with Jones as vice-president of the project.²⁹  It ran about 90 days from 28 June, with 20 scientists from five countries, and sent about a thousand samples to Ankara.⁴⁵  A press release of 23 September reported cores to 18 m and claimed that "none of the holes drilled inside the formation encountered a continuous bedrock or solid limestone block."  In one hole, "approximately 4–5 meters below the surface," the drill "struck a layer so hard that the drill bit broke."  The release offered "Petrified or highly mineralized wood" as "a possibility we want to investigate through third party lab testing."²⁹  Atila himself was more cautious.  He told Turkish reporters that claims of 100 percent proof "şu an için tam doğru sonuçları yansıtmasa da," do not for now reflect the exact results, that "Toprak analiz süreci hala devam ediyor," the soil analysis is still going on, and that the results would be published "kısa süre içinde bilimsel kitap ve makale olarak," shortly as a scientific book and article.⁴⁶  He set the test himself:  carbon dating of organic material would show "burada gerçekten gemi olup olmadığını," whether there really is a ship here.⁴⁵

Two things follow.  First, a layer "harder than limestone" at 4 to 5 m is exactly where the 1988 holes entered "layered bedrock" at 5 m.  Hard rock at that depth is what the earlier cores predict.  Second, the 2026 results are a fair test, and they are not yet in.  If identified wood with intact cells, dated to the third millennium BC, comes out of those cores, this article will be wrong and will need to be rewritten.  Until then the 2026 season has added cores but no evidence.

Part 8: Why the creationist organisations reject it

The case against Durupınar was not made by skeptics attacking creationism.  It was made, almost entirely, by creationists who would have been glad to be wrong.

1976, the first two creationist papers.  The Creation Research Society Quarterly printed two articles on the site in one issue.  Shea argued that "while the formation is not the Ark itself, it may be the resting-place of the Ark," a hollow in hardened mud where the Ark had lain.¹⁶  Beside it Clifford Burdick, a creationist geologist who had walked the site in 1973, gave the opposite verdict:  "In his opinion it has nothing to do with the Ark."¹⁵  He and a companion "hunted for charcoal, or charred remains of a ship; but we were unable to find any."¹⁵

1990, John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research.  Morris, a geological engineer, wrote after two geological surveys of the site:  "I am convinced (as is nearly everyone) that everything there has a perfectly rational and simple geologic explanation."¹⁹  He reported Baumgardner's change of mind:  "Although formerly convinced that this formation was probably the remains of the Ark, Dr Baumgardner now believes there is less than a 10 percent chance that anything man-made is present."¹⁹  And he named what would change his own mind:  "What is needed is for the advocates of this site … to make their data and observations available for study. If they are right, the evidence will bear it out. Such openness has not yet been offered."¹⁹

1992, Andrew Snelling and Creation magazine.  Snelling, a young-earth geologist then with the Creation Science Foundation in Australia, now Creation Ministries International, checked the claims one by one, telephoned the laboratories, and drew on letters or conversations with Baumgardner, Bayraktutan, Fenner and Shea.⁶  His summary:  "Unfortunately, not one of these seemingly convincing claims stands up."⁶  He drew a theological point as well:  "the Bible in no way says that Noah's Ark would be preserved as a witness to future generations."⁶  Answers in Genesis reprints both the Morris and the Snelling articles under the heading "Arguments to Avoid."¹¹

2006 to 2026, Creation Ministries International.  CMI's list of "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use" includes "Ron Wyatt has found Noah's Ark" with the verdict:  "This claimed Ark shape is a natural geological formation caused by a mud flow."⁴⁷  In 2006 it wrote of its own 1992 investigation:  "Sadly, though we would have been delighted if this really were the Ark, we found almost all the specific claims to be untrue and/or misleading."⁴⁸  Responding to the 2026 cores, it still refers readers to the 1992 article "to show them why, subject to some totally unexpected evidence surfacing, we think that this site has nothing to do with Noah's Ark," and advises "not getting hopes up, and particularly avoiding using it in witnessing to others."¹²

2026, the Institute for Creation Research.  Brian Thomas wrote that "ICR and others have investigated Durupinar and found compelling reasons to cross it off the list of possible ark sites."¹³  He gives three reasons:  the shape, Baumgardner's conclusion that the shape is natural, and that "Solid rock is not a good candidate for an ark's wooden walls."¹³

Their reasons, weighed.  The organisations' strongest reasons are the empirical ones above:  the cores, the radar, the failed samples and the lookalike shapes.  Two of their other reasons are weaker and are not needed.

• Both CMI and ICR argue that the Ark was a box, because Genesis calls it a tēbâ. ICR: "Boxes do not have curved sides with pointy ends."¹³ But the only other vessel the Hebrew Bible calls a tēbâ is the papyrus basket in which the infant Moses was set among the reeds.⁴⁹ The word shows that the Ark was a container that floated. It does not say what its plan looked like.
• ICR describes Baumgardner's conclusion as "An ancient lava flow hit some resistant material and flowed around it to soon harden into its lens shape."¹³ That is not what Baumgardner wrote. His account is of mud in a landslide "flowing around a narrow ridge-shaped body of rock."¹ The verdict is the same, but the mechanism ICR gives is not his.

The creationist accounts also disagree about the rock, as Part 1 showed.  That is a weakness of the record, which has never been written up in full, not of the conclusion.  On the conclusion itself they agree, and they have agreed since 1976:  the site is natural, and Christians should stop citing it.  The parent article, Searching for Noah's Ark, explains why the text of Genesis does not require any particular peak or mound;  Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly and Mount Cudi and the Older Tradition judge the other candidates.

Objections and responses

1. "The length is exactly 300 Egyptian cubits. That cannot be chance." It is close only at the royal cubit, which was chosen after the mound was measured. At the common cubit the mound is 13 to 23 % too long. And the published lengths themselves run from 150 to 164 m, so the match to Wyatt's 515 ft is no better than the measurements. A coincidence of length within about 5 % is not rare when one is free to choose the unit.
2. "The walls splayed outward under the mud, so the width is what a collapsed Ark would leave." This is the strongest reply, and Part 6 grants that the outline fits it: a hull whose sides fell flat at the common cubit would leave a 160 by 49 m footprint. But a collapsed hull leaves its floor in the middle and its sides in the walls. At least two of the three holes near the centre line reached rock within 5 m, no hole found wood, the auger holes found rock at 1 m, and the walls are mud and boulders. A collapsed hull must still be somewhere, and it is not in any hole drilled into it.
3. "Radar shows right angles, corridors and rooms." The radar firm's own report says its rectangles are "NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CANNOT BE DETERMINED," and Jones's own 2024 paper says "More scientific research is needed." Radar maps changes in the ground's electrical properties, and a fractured rock block inside a landslide makes straight and crossing reflectors. The 1987 radar also showed a striking flat reflector, and drilling showed it to be the top of rock.
4. "The soil inside has more organic matter and potassium. That is decayed wood." The figures are unpublished and inconsistent: twice, three times, 40 % more. More important, the inside and outside are different materials by every geologist's account, so a difference is expected with no ship at all. Decayed wood would be shown by wood, identified under a microscope, not by a bulk soil number.
5. "The 1988 cores failed or were contaminated, so they prove nothing." Baumgardner, who drilled them, reported "reasonably good cores from each of the holes" in 1988, and his later account gives the depth to rock hole by hole. Bayraktutan's complaint is that the fine-grained material was not recovered. Cooling water can wash fines out of a core. It cannot turn wood into rock, and it cannot put bedrock at 5 m where a hull's floor should be. The 2026 drill also hit a layer hard enough to break its bit at 4 to 5 m.
6. "Baumgardner recanted to keep his job at Los Alamos." Baumgardner answered this in 1997: "Ron's claims here are just as bogus as his claims about that site. Far from hiding my creationism, I'm well known for it." Snelling made the same point in 1992: Baumgardner was "openly an internationally respected creationist scientist, presenting papers at the 1986 and 1990 International Conferences on Creationism."⁶ His change of mind followed the 1988 drilling, and he gave the reason: the cores showed a ridge of rock.
7. "The Turkish government recognised the site as Noah's Ark." It built a visitor centre and protected the site, and a governor held a ceremony in 1987. Bayraktutan, a member of the governor's commission, said it "has never declared the site to definitely be Noah's Ark or a boat," and his own account says the site was protected in memory of Noah's Flood because of its unusual features. Two Turkish teams from Ankara returned negative reports in 1985. Heritage protection is not an archaeological finding.
8. "The anchor stones at Kazan prove the Ark was nearby." They are local volcanic rock, 16 to 24 km away, with no rope wear in their holes and carved crosses numbering from three to twenty. The crosses are Christian symbols. Noah could not have carried stones quarried from the place where he landed.
9. "The creationist organisations reject Durupınar only because it competes with Mount Ararat." Morris granted that the site lies "within the region called 'the mountains of Ararat' in Genesis."¹⁹ Snelling answered this charge in 1992: Morris and ICR "would be ecstatic at the Ark's discovery, no matter by whom, nor where on the 'mountains of Ararat'," and had searched Ağrı Dağı only because the eyewitness reports pointed there.⁶ The reasons given are cores, assays and thin sections, which would count against the site wherever it was. CMI has also rejected claims made for Ağrı Dağı itself, such as the Hong Kong team's "wooden discoveries on Mt Ararat."¹²
10. "Skeptics are only saying it is natural because they deny the Flood." The decisive work was done by people who believe in the Flood, and they reported against their hopes. The verdict here does not depend on any view of the Flood, or on Collins's argument that the fossil limestone predates the Flood.
11. A skeptic's objection: "Wood could not survive 4,400 years anyway, so the absence of wood proves nothing either way." Wood survives for thousands of years when sealed from oxygen, as the Uluburun wreck shows, and it can petrify in decades where silica-rich water flows. Either way it stays recognisable as wood under a microscope. A buried Ark in wet clay is the setting most likely to preserve wood, so its absence from the cores does count.
12. "The 2026 results may still show wood." They may. That is a fair test, and Atila set it himself. If the cores yield wood with intact cells, identified and radiocarbon dated by an independent laboratory, the case should be reopened. Until then the claim rests on radar images whose makers say they cannot tell natural from man-made.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The core logs. The 1988 core logs and the 1987 seismic data have never been published. Snelling's promised technical paper has not been found. The five accounts of the four holes disagree on depths and on core quality. This article relies on Baumgardner's own statements, and it would change if the logs said something different.
2. The rock. Calc-schist, fossil-bearing limestone, Miocene limestone, ophiolite and basalt have all been named for the same mound. A published geological map and petrography of the core would settle it. Collins's argument that the limestone postdates the structure depends on the limestone's geometry, which he himself later described differently; this article does not use it.
3. The exposure date. The 1948 earthquake rests on one villager's memory, retold by Fasold, and Fasold's own book also quotes a Turkish newspaper report of 13 November 1948 in which the farmer's sighting came about two months earlier, high on the 16,000-foot peak.²¹ Bayraktutan gives August 1949. Neither year has a catalogued earthquake near the site. The Associated Press report of 13 November 1948 and Pix of 9 July 1960 were not read.
4. Life, 5 September 1960. The page itself could not be read. Its text is quoted here from a reproduction by Wyatt's supporters, and its caption from Collins. The question of whether the photograph was taken by the army or the air force rests on it.
5. The 1960 expedition. Its members are listed differently by different sources: Fasold names Vandeman, Durupınar, Brandenberger, Noorbergen and Horn; Merling names Vandeman and Don Loveridge. Vandeman's own press release was not found. No source read names anyone called Wolper.
6. The 2026 cores. The laboratory results are promised for the winter of 2026-2027. The Anadolu Agency interview with Atila and any Sivas Cumhuriyet University release were not found. The claim that no hole inside the outline reached continuous bedrock contradicts Baumgardner's account of 1988, and both rest on logs nobody has published.
7. The soil analyses. No laboratory, method, depth or sample list has been released for any of the soil figures.
8. Bayraktutan's position. His 2019 paper describes the mound as a landslide mass and also as the nearest thing on earth to a ship's trace. He has not published an argument for a man-made object. An English statement of his present view would help.
9. Other people. This article found no published Durupınar work by Fethi Ahmet Yüksel, sometimes named with the project, and no Andrews University field or laboratory report. The 1986 Turkish geological survey reports on the Telçeker landslide, listed by Noah's Ark Scans, were not obtained.

Verdict

The Durupınar formation is a natural landform:  a firmer mass of rock and mud in an active earthflow, streamlined by the debris moving past it.  Its outline is boat-like, and if its sides are assumed to have fallen outward, even its size can be made to fit a collapsed Ark at the common cubit.  The material cannot.  Every sample sectioned as wood was volcanic rock, at least two of the three cores near its centre line reached rock within 5 m, and nobody who drilled it found wood, petrified or not.  The same shape occurs elsewhere in the same district.

The people who showed this were, for the most part, creationists who wanted the Ark found:  Burdick in 1976, Morris in 1990, Baumgardner after his own drilling in 1988, and Snelling in 1992.  Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International and the Institute for Creation Research all tell Christians not to use the site.  The radar and soil claims made since 2019 are unpublished, and their own authors' careful statements leave the question open rather than closed.  The 2026 cores are a fair test.  Until they produce identified, dated wood, there is no Ark at Durupınar.

Sources